A Hillary-style personal email server - who wants one?

[lasbrg]

Edit: Clarification of what this thread is supposed to be about in post #11.
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I do! Does anyone have any links, or other ideas, about the specs?

[teg33]

There's no such things as super secure in the realm of internet

[Cyberion]

Secure? No. Secret? Yes.

Technical difficulties will be blamed for the thousands of soon to be reported "lost" emails.

[lasbrg]

There's no such things as super secure in the realm of internet

What I was going for was a thread about the hypocrisy of the FBI lobbying Congress to outlaw independent, secure communications and the news that the heiress to the presidency was attempting exactly that. If it's good enough for her, why isn't it good enough for the rest of us? And I would like to know the details of her system. Hopefully they will come out, as either her own disclosure, or else in the report of some investigation.

As a side note, Hillary is exceedingly proud and not likely to admit that setting up her encrypted communications service was a mistake. This might establish a useful precedent going forward.

[Tripper]

I would bet hacker group anonymous is already working on making her stuff public

[speedrrracer]

Agreed on the hypocrisy, but disagree that Hillary has anything significantly better than you or I could get. I doubt there are any details that, once you knew them, would inform you in creating a more secure system than you currently could.

[msternin]

The most secure server is the one that is not plugged in. ;-)

[vintagearms]

I would bet hacker group anonymous is already working on making her stuff public

I would love to see this.

[msternin]

I would love to see this.

Why does everyone presume the server(s) were or are being backed up or there is any retention schedule?

When I dealt with writing polices around this, I would do a single day backup (incase of virus, etc...) and ZERO day retention schedule. Anything retained is commonly referred to as "evidence".

[ocabj]

What I was going for was a thread about the hypocrisy of the FBI lobbying Congress to outlaw independent, secure communications and the news that the heiress to the presidency was attempting exactly that. If it's good enough for her, why isn't it good enough for the rest of us? And I would like to know the details of her system. Hopefully they will come out, as either her own disclosure, or else in the report of some investigation.

As a side note, Hillary is exceedingly proud and not likely to admit that setting up her encrypted communications service was a mistake. This might establish a useful precedent going forward.

I think you're misunderstanding the issue at hand. The crux of the whole controversy is that she used an email account that was hosted on her own email server in her house for actual work use. That is to say whatever email address domain she used had the MX records pointing to her server.

Hosting your own email server and having a domain/email account on that box means that you have full control of inbound and outbound auditing for the given email address(es). This includes email transfer / routing logs, and not just the actual emails themselves.

For instance, if wanted to have deniability regarding correspondence, you could go into the mail logs, and remove all entries for the given emails along with deleting the emails themselves. If the person on the other end did the same, or wasn't in scope of a subpoena (unknown party), then that would be enough to cover it up.

Whether or not she had nefarious intentions by using a fully controlled email server for work use, who can say. But if she wanted to avoid all of this, she could have just used a Government hosted email address for work use, and personal email for personal use.

I'm pretty sure most of us here use multiple email address, one specifically for work related use and one(s) for other non-work related.

[lasbrg]

I think you're misunderstanding the issue at hand. The crux of the whole controversy is that she used an email account that was hosted on her own email server in her house for actual work use. That is to say whatever email address domain she used had the MX records pointing to her server.

Hosting your own email server and having a domain/email account on that box means that you have full control of inbound and outbound auditing for the given email address(es). This includes email transfer / routing logs, and not just the actual emails themselves.

For instance, if wanted to have deniability regarding correspondence, you could go into the mail logs, and remove all entries for the given emails along with deleting the emails themselves. If the person on the other end did the same, or wasn't in scope of a subpoena (unknown party), then that would be enough to cover it up.

Whether or not she had nefarious intentions by using a fully controlled email server for work use, who can say. But if she wanted to avoid all of this, she could have just used a Government hosted email address for work use, and personal email for personal use.

I'm pretty sure most of us here use multiple email address, one specifically for work related use and one(s) for other non-work related.

I'm misunderstanding the issue of my own thread? If I wanted to start a thread on the Clinton email controversy, I would have done it in OT. (Except I think there ar at least three of those already.) In this forum, I wanted to talk about what it would take to recreate her set-up. Speculation is fine. Comparable configurations would be fine. Anything related to the technical aspects of email servers would be fine.

[msternin]

I'm misunderstanding the issue of my own thread? If I wanted to start a thread on the Clinton email controversy, I would have done it in OT. (Except I think there ar at least three of those already.) In this forum, I wanted to talk about what it would take to recreate her set-up. Speculation is fine. Comparable configurations would be fine. Anything related to the technical aspects of email servers would be fine.

Hey, who would know better than NOT you on your understanding of a thread you started. :-)

[SMR510]

I'm misunderstanding the issue of my own thread? If I wanted to start a thread on the Clinton email controversy, I would have done it in OT. (Except I think there ar at least three of those already.) In this forum, I wanted to talk about what it would take to recreate her set-up. Speculation is fine. Comparable configurations would be fine. Anything related to the technical aspects of email servers would be fine.

I know that my Snyology NAS has the capability to host a Mail server. You can probably do it on any computer really, just would need some software and a static external IP so it doesn't change unexpectedly.

[odysseus]

Plenty of guides out there online on setting up your own mail/relay/smtp server however flavor you want to do it, even with anti-spam resources. Your question is vague because there are many ways to slice this pie, and dependent on your abilities in setting this up and managing it. Most techies will have a basic grasp on what this is about and where to take the first steps.

For example, a growing number of people host their own "cloud" storage for their devices, and mail servers themselves for deep level control of those resources, or just to do it because they can. There are pro's and con's and it depends on what you want throw at it hardware as well, sometimes it doesn't make sense for people even when it sounds like a fun idea conceptually.

[BigFatGuy]

I've run my own web server, email server, ftp server, even had file-sharing capabilities on it for a while. All from a residential-class DSL line.

If you have decent computer skills it's not hard to set up.

Eventually I decided I'd rather pay someone $7/month to deal with it... but then I'm not in the business of hiding illegal activities from voters.