E-Mail, the stodgy old program so many of us rely on, is a mainstay in our daily lives. In the era of Facebook, Twitter and SnapChat, email seems so old fashioned and archaic, yet, it is probably the most import part of our digital life. We take email and its privacy for granted, and most people don’t think much about their email account.
How does E-Mail work?
E-Mail was developed as a store and forward communication mechanism, based largely on the postal mail paradigm. UnliYou compose a message electronically, address it with a digital address (the email address) and send it. The recipient usually (but not always) has an email address. So, far it seems pretty straightforward and just like the postal mail. So lets examine the postal system for a minute. To mail a letter, you must compose it on some kind of material, usually paper, put into an envelope and then drop it into a mailbox. A local post office must collect mail from this mailbox, sort it and then deliver it to the post office that serves the recipient’s area. When the recipient’s post office gets the mail, it delivers it to the mailbox of the recipient, who then collects it at his/her convenience. There are good analogies between the two systems. The mailbox exists at both ends, the post offices are like the mail servers, one for sender and another for recipient. In the postal system, a letter is delivered once, and when delivered, the postal system has no further access to it
Not quite like that postal service
This where, the two systems diverge dramatically. Imagine, if the notepad you wrote with could keep a copy of your letter. The mailbox you dropped the letter in, kept a copy of your letter. The post office that collected the letter from the mailbox kept a copy of your letter, the delivery truck that took your letter from one post office to another made a copy of your letter, as did the receiving post office and the recipient’s mail box! Everyone who helped deliver the letter kept a copy of the letter, all of which can choose to keep those copies for ever, if they are willing to foot the storage cost. Every one of them has a record of who the mail was from, who the mail was to and what was in the mail. Now imagine mail could be delivered to any number of post offices along the way, not just the one intended, and each post office will forward it, but keep a copy. This is how electronic mail works. The mail clients (Outlook, Pandora, Mac Mail etc.) keep a copy of the message, and deliver it to the mail server providing the service (MSN, Yahoo, Gmail, iCloud or company email servers) where you have an account. Depending on the protocol you used (IMAP or POP) the server will continue to store a copy of your in bound messages, and it always stores your outbound messages. The servers communicate with each other using a SMTP protocol, which is not a secure protocol in general. There are a lot of other complicated technologies that are involved in modern mail systems, but the gist remains the same. Messages can be made to appear that they are addressed from any source, transmission is not really secure, and there are numerous copies of your email made along the way. There are technologies available to send secure mail, and some banks are adopting them, but they are not common or flawless yet.
There are crumbs everywhere!
Usually, people receive their email on a browser, and in a email client and on a mobile device. Thus, for most people, there are at least three locations where their messages may be stored, not counting the service providers in each case. When devices are lost, or stolen, those messages may be recovered. Many people trade in their devices or donate their computers or hand them down to relatives without paying attention to email that may still be stored on the computers.
If you are diligent, and keep your email accounts secure, you may still be exposing your content as every time you open an attachment in a browser, it downloads it into a temporary area on the hard drive, and that is true of home machines, hotel computers, kiosks and any other public machine like a library machine. Even after you log off and close the machine, those files remain on the hard drive, unless the browser is set to delete all history and temporary files every time it exits. When email is deleted, most modern mail servers keep it in a deleted folder with two stages. First stage is where it stays in the user mailbox, which can be easily recovered by the user. If a user clears the deleted folder, mail still can be recovered from a system level folder that administrators can access. If mail is deleted from there as well, it continues to live in the backup of the mail systems, operating systems etc. all of which have purge cycles that vary from one year to 10 years, and that is after the mail has been intentionally deleted from every instance on the server! Many companies have adopted e-discovery regimes where mail is never deleted from the server side. In fact a separate and independent copy of the message is made and out into a permanent archive as it is received or sent.
E-Mail can cost you real money
People think of their personal email as at best an embarrassment risk. You may be embarrassed if your emails were accessed and any remarks or content not meant to be private was made public. Generally, people do not consider email to be a financial risk in the same manner they consider their bank accounts to be. So email passwords tend to be simple, easily guessed passwords. Also, as many servers do not enforce any particular password policy, they may remain unchanged for long periods of time. Birthdays, family names, pet names, home street, favorite team are common passwords for most people and easily guessed.
Unfortunately, personal email accounts are as much a financial risk as a bank account is. The reason for that is very simple, but often ignored. Every account that we think has financial impact (bank account, retirement account etc.) has a feature for “forgot password”, where you can reset your password if you forgot it or locked yourself out due to typing errors. So, when you forget your ID or password, the ID and the new password or the link to create a new password is sent to your email address, so a person with access to your email account could easily get access to your financial accounts. Not only that, they can then leverage that information to get your social security number (or national identity numbers in other countries).
What are the legal remedies?
Email is covered under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 (ECPA) in US and the Privacy Directive in EU which forbids unauthorized access of electronic systems and unauthorized use of private information. However, EPCA is from an era when a small population used email and revisions have been proposed for years to deal with current realities. One example is that, while the ECPA protects communications stored for less than 180 days from search without a judge’s order, it does not afford such protection to communications stored for over 180 days. In addition, it deals with communication in transit differently from communication in storage giving different protections. House has just approved a revision to this act, which would afford the same protections to communications stored more than 180 days. Individuals who violate ECPA face up to five years in prison and fines up to $250,000, but in case of federal government, the situation is more complicated due to Patriot Act as well as the fact that ECPA gives no cause of action against US, however, evidence seized in violation of ECPA cannot be introduced in court.
What can you do?
So what can you do to protect your self and your privacy? First, treat email the way treat your financial information. Contain the number of devices you access your email from. If you send important information via email (credit or loan applications, credit card numbers, purchase agreements etc.) that has your personal information on it, encrypt the attachment before sending it. Most PDF programs support such encryption. While the encryption may be breakable, its larger benefit is that it makes your email attachment not searchable in the vast volume of emails that are processed. Never send the attachment and the encryption password in the same message. If possible, don’t send the password in email at all, call the person instead. Separate your financial institution information from personal email, and use two-factor protection if your institution offers it. If you can, separate your financial life to a different email account, just like you separate work and home, and do not access that email from multiple devices. With a little digital hygiene and simple segregation, you can significantly improve the privacy and security of your email. If your e-mail is provided by your employer, make sure you read and understand what their policies are on privacy of your email.