1) They can then censor your outgoing email.
you are sending through their routers, they can cc and sniff you SMTP traffic all they want already. They don't need you to send through their SMTP gateways to enable their prying.
2) They can archive and view your outgoing email more easily (sure, who cares? but, perhaps they have other clients that are your competitors? Perhaps they wish to build a db of email addresses to sell that will include your customers (and since they know that also, they can easily forge it as being from you).
Easier via SMTP relay, but not at all impossible since they can get it all just by sniffing their routers for SMTP protocol traffic.
3) It makes surveillance requests easier for the ISP to comply with
They can do that now. (The UK govt laid such a requirement on UK ISPs, that they archive all connection and mail traffic for years, but no $$$ to pay for it.)
mail servers. Most likely, the ISP that is relaying any mail becomes subject to conspiracy charges, so then "cooperates" by opening up archives to mail or copies all mail, without more stringent warrants being required.
If the ISP is archiving relayed mail, yes. But you said yourself they would have to be crazy to do so. Thanks for defeating your own points.
You may be thinking, we don't do anything illegal, so who cares?
What case law or legislation holds carriers like ISPs and their upstreams, and why not all backbone operators? liable for content of the traffic?
Start thinking of local govts that bring criminal child porn charges (a mayor in TN is being charged with receiving somewhere around 6 emails over three years that contained child porn pictures -- he claims they were spam porn, but the local govt is proceeding).
Liable for receiving the child porn. Is the ISP liable for delivering it? Is the USPO, FedEx, UPS liable for child porn deliveries?
Again, if the ISP is relaying such pictures (and grandma's pics of the grandkids in the tub has been ruled porn in some jurisdictions), they are then "involved".
Simple mechanical relaying or web hosting or chat room hosting where criminal content is present do not implicate the "carrier" or ISP, UNLESS the ISP is involved in editing the content. I call you on my SBC telephone line and plan a crime. Is SBC guilty?
The main danger in this is that what is considered a reasonable amount of privacy is being rapidly eroded as
Personal privacy is a myth. You can bet the FBI and CIA aren't concerned about respecting any laws about privacy as long as they cloak it "national security".
If you think unencrypted email is "private and secure" because it doesn't go through your ISP's SMTP gateway, you really sound like a "20 minute admin".
No doubt there are many other reasons. Personally, #1 is the biggie. At least if my mail server sends directly, I know the email went thru.
Do you really think your ISPs "official" SMTP gateway (and whole router plant) for ALL of his subscribers is less reliable than your own Imail server?
Were I a big ISP, I would worry about #2, #3, someone accidentally setting their mail server as an open relay (which would get ME listed in spamcop and then prevent mail being sent from all my other customers as well, which could then get me involved in some lawsuit or at least cost me a lot of support time) and the increased load of handling everyone elses mail, which would mean more costs for me.
So, now we come to another self-defeating point, thank you. So you think ISPs should not trust their own subscribers with mailservers on the ISP's netblocks, but you expect AOL to trust those mailservers?
Of course, if I were instead an enforcer or prosecutor of the law, having all email only go thru very large, easily located and threatened ISP's would make my job much easier.
The USA security apparatus has $50+B in annual budget. What makes you think they aren't already sniffing every piece of email already, no matter how you relay it?
Len
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