I need a new email solution

[HecklerNKoch]

I log into the server that holds my emails and use their web interface to run through them there daily. Then I download them to my email app and delete them from the server. So, yes, they are stored on someone else's machine, but only briefly.

My only intention is to inform you, not to correct you.


Think of it from the host's perspective.

They get hacked. They have to have countermeasures in place. You're not going to receive an apology letter saying 'we've lost all your data.'



There are retention policies that are not known to you. There are clusters that aren't on their public-facing network.

As the end-user you merely see a GUI with a check-mark and a delete button.


As the host, they bear a ton of responsibility and that little delete icon merely clears up space for you.



Stepping aside from the tech perspective, under current law, any email, deleted, read or unread, can be accessed by law enforcement by subpoena. I don't know a thing about the law. But you'll find that in the email privacy act. What's the point of bringing this up? Nothing got deleted. Your usable space merely opened up.



Back to tech, when you delete a file on your hard drive, it too isn't taken out of existence, again, you have cleared up space by moving the deleted object to a pool of unallocated space.



Digital stratigraphy has really advanced.

From a forensic analysis perspective, data length slack is what will be beneficial because it will contain remnants of deleted data and depending on the file system of the operating system deleted data can remain in the VDL slack indefinitely, even surviving after data destruction methods and tools have been used. The case is far, far worse for solid state drives.

None of this is paranoia. All of this is trivial and inconsequential to the end-user.


What is deleted for you doesn't go away that easily. If it did, the hosting company would have a single point of failure.How easy, then, their job would be, not to worry about safeguarding your data from threats they are dealing with daily, nightly.

[Cowboy T]

And you can wipe it clean with a cloth!

Nah, better to go "The Sharper Image" retro and use an ionic air cleaner.

But seriously, Raspberry Pis do make pretty darn good email, DNS, and Web servers. This is true even of the Raspberry Pi 2 series (the 3 and 4 are really nice).

[Cowboy T]

Your emails resides on the mail servers that host your domain. For $12/year it is in the same metal as hundreds of other hosted domain email plans.

When mail is sent to your website’s domain address, the email is routed across the internet, on to that server and numerous mirrors of that server in a distributed namespace.

When email is sent to you, a name server looks up the MX record of where to route your emails. You can look up the MX record and see where it went and where it came from.

Mozilla Thunderbird is a great cross-platform software that simply uses one of three basic protocols to fetch the email from the mail server where your emails are kept.

I am only writing this to let you know that your emails are stored on machines not owned by you.

The emails you have aren't forwarded but retrieved from someone else's machines.

Depends on the protocol you use. If you use POP, it's actually on your PC. If you use IMAP, it's on the server, though with Mozilla Thunderbird (which I also use and like a lot), the default is also to make a local copy on your PC. If you use straight Web mail, then it's of course only on the server.

Perhaps @Rorge Retson was using POP back in the day. Today, very few people still use POP, so generally speaking, what you're saying is correct.

[HecklerNKoch]

Depends on the protocol you use. If you use POP, it's actually on your PC. If you use IMAP, it's on the server, though with Mozilla Thunderbird (which I also use and like a lot), the default is also to make a local copy on your PC. If you use straight Web mail, then it's of course only on the server.

Perhaps @Rorge Retson was using POP back in the day. Today, very few people still use POP, so generally speaking, what you're saying is correct.

I'm afraid it's a bit more complex than that. Given how technical this could get, and knowing there are limits I can go with you, I probably should end this dialogue here. Almost Happy Friday.

[The War Wagon]

Been using it since 1996!

https://www.juno.com/freeemail