[Discuss] TLD for Personal Use - Email

[willrico at gmail.com (Will Rico)]

On Sun, Jun 9, 2013 at 4:10 PM, Bill Horne <bill at horne.net> wrote:
>
> On 6/9/2013 3:31 PM, Will Rico wrote:
>>
>> Given the downside of government/corporate snooping with hosted/cloud
>> email services like GMail and the overhead/complexity of running a
>> personal mail server, I'm wondering how common it is for small groups
>> of trusted friends to setup a single mail server for their collective
>> needs.  Does anyone have experience with that type of setup?
>>
>> ...
>
> I get the impression that you are confusing email with groupware.

I mentioned "small groups," but I was actually thinking of email.  I
was thinking of two issues that have been raised in this thread and
others:
(1)  The most reliable and secure/private email system is one you
control yourself.  GMail and the like can't be trusted longterm on
several grounds, and independent ISPs that provide quality email
service occasionally disappear.

(2)  Setting up a proper email system with exim and Spam Assassin (or
similar alternatives) takes work and maintenance.  Plus there is the
expense of server space, bandwidth, power and redundancy.

So if a few trusted friends got together, they could split the work
and expense of (2) and take advantage of the optimal solution as per
(1).  This is more of a thought exercise.  I don't mean to be
recruiting people to setup an email server with me ;-)

> If you are concerned about preventing  a stranger from reading your email,
> you can purchase or create a digital certificate that makes it much less
> likely, no matter what path the bits take on their way from your email
> client to someone else's email client.  That is what "SSL' is for.

As I understand, this assumes you control the email server.  If you
rely on Google (as I do at the moment), it appears (as per PRISM) that
there are backdoors for the government, et. al. to read your email.
PGP would prevent this, but you would need cooperation from the people
you email with.  Meta data (who is emailing who) would still be in the
open.

Will