Protect Your Data (Part 1) – Emails
This is the first part of number of articles aimed at helping you understand how to take responsibility for the protection of all of your digital data.
In this part we cover the topic of understanding where your emails are kept and to give you some helpful information on what you can do to protect your valuable collection of emails.
Email Storage
Ask the person next to you if they know where their email is kept and unless they are in the IT business, will just say:- “On my phone” or “on my PC”.
It turns out that neither of these answers are true anymore for most people. So I thought I would give you a quick rundown of where the actual emails reside. Remember that email systems and delivery can be a complex subject, so I will explain in layman’s terms so that most people can benefit from this knowledge.
| Email Address | Who Stores Your Email | Where Is It Stored? |
|---|---|---|
etc. | The part after the @ symbol is the domain name of the host that currently has your email. gmail.com = Google optusnet.com.au = Optus outlook.com = Microsoft If you are in doubt who actually stores your data, simply look up the domain name owner using something like whois.is | Large data centres throughout the world. These are most likely to be close to your geographic location. |
etc. | The part after the @ symbol is the domain name of the broadband supplier in your country. When you paid to connect to a broadband service, you were most likely offered an email address with their domain as a suffix. | The data is either stored locally, in server facilities owned by the broadband supplier or handed to Google, Microsoft or Amazon servers. |
| The part after the @ symbol is the domain that your employer has purchased to allow them to fully customise their web presence. This generally includes their websites and employee email address. | The data is stored in a server room at the company, if they are large, or simply at a “hosting provider” if they are a smaller company. |
Email Delivery
In 2023 most email is not really delivered. Yes, they are passed from computer to computer, but the final delivery location is what is described in the table above.
Email Browsing
This term best describes what you do when you look at your email. Typical email clients include: your browser, Microsoft Mail, Thunderbird and native email clients built into mobile phones.
Unless you have a very old computer and use very old technology set up to use the pop protocol, you are most likely using the imap protocol to access your email, as this is generally considered the recommended, default or modern protocol.
With this protocol, the email stays exactly were it is, on a central server, whether it’s read, unread, archived or deleted. The program that you use to look at your email simply requests a status change to the email at the storage facility. When you “send” and email, it is temporarily created in the application that you use to look at emails and then packaged and stored at the storage facility.
Email Security
Now that you know where your emails are stored, you see that your emails are only as secure as any of the data that is stored at the storage facility. If it a large company like, Optus, Google or Microsoft then you trusting that they have systems in place to backup and protect your data in the event of a disaster (cyber attack, damage to equipment, human error).
If your data is stored at your company, your information is only as secure as your company’s IT department security and disaster recovery process.
So for most people, you will see that somebody else is looking after your information and you trust that they will take good care of it. So perhaps, you should take steps to take ownership of the information contained in your emails, since recent events have highlighted that it does not matter how big the company is, that manages your email, they can make mistakes and systems break.
Email Privacy
Emails are basically never private. In fact, you may not know this, but there are people who are responsible for managing the servers at the storage facilities that can read and review anything in your emails, without restriction. This is normal and understood in our industry. Even if you have encrypted emails, all the common Internet service providers (broadband providers) can read who it is from, how it got to you and also the SUBJECT text.
Taking Ownership of Your Email
Ok, now we know what the scope of the issue is, let’s put together a basic strategy to conduct any business, or communication via email.
- Never send confidential information by email. Consider the email system as you would sending a letter in the post without an envelope.
- Never put confidential information in the SUBJECT line of encrypted emails
- Always make your own copy, on your own computer, of any email that your consider is important from a personal or business viewpoint.
Let’s tackle the last suggestion first. Most email readers allow you to “save” on a local storage device. This is extra work, but virtually the only way that a novice can ensure that they can walk away with emails, in the even of a data loss at their provider or company.
Email Service Provider
Another option available to help you take ownership of your email is to use a dedicated email service provider. You have many choices, but the one that I use is first class is Protonmail.
If you use a service provider such as this, you have a lot more control over what happens to your emails and how the “data” is stored and distributed.
Rather than repeating the information on the Protonmail website, rest assured that they have product offerings that supports ordinary email users, right through to business users. Their infrastructure is supported by Swiss privacy laws, which are renown for being the best in the world.
Taking up a service such as this and making copies of your valuable emails on a local storage device should set up well on the path to taking full responsibility of your own email and data.
Protonmail even have a feature which allows you to encrypt the whole email message, including the SUBJECT, when sending between Protonmail users. This would certainly add the next level of privacy to your confidential communications.
Part 2. To Be Continued….
In the next instalment of these articles, we will cover the concept of “cloud storage”. This concept has some interesting ownership implications and usage challenges.