In the early 90's, when the broadband internet started to reach small and medium companies in Germany, I was made responsible for establishing the internet connectivity in our company, beside my main job. We got hosted our own DNS, Web and Mail services. That was the time when Fax communication was still very popular – and I advised to every user of our e-mail service that they should expect the same level of privacy which they would expect from the Fax machines in our offices.
Would my advice be different nowadays? Generally "NO", and "PERHAPS", if you are ready to spent a lot of effort and knowledge into building you own mailing system. Anyway, you would never know what happens on the other side.
To begin with, the admins can always read and manipulate everything. Personally, I never did it without express permissions of the respective user(s), because my
mother told me that it is not
decent to read other peoples mails.
4 years ago, inspired by the Snowden revelation, I wrote a series of articles in the Howto section of this forum:
Home Mail Server with TLS and non-Plain authentication - (my user name was
rolfheinrich that time). Despite all these high tech levels of encryption, the e-mail privacy on public mail services – whether officially hacked or not – is less than that of the Fax machines in the offices in the 90's. You never know if somebody read your communications, and even worse you don't know who could have read it.
I always saw the scandal of the private e-mail server of the former US foreign secretary in that light – I would have wanted my private mail server as well – as a matter of fact I do have – and of course interested parties are/were pissed off mainly, because they could not read the mails and act upon before the designated receiver.
Bottom line. We must not expect too much. E-mailing is like faxing to a fax machine standing in the mid of the Time Square. Keeping this in mind, it does not matter, whether NSA, KGB, GHCQ, BND, ... servants and a bunch of criminals have
decent mothers or not.
