Idk if this is the right community for this conversation, but it’s been on my mind and I want to share it with someone.
In the 00’s every new thing we heard about the internet was exciting. There were new protocols, new ways to communicate, new ways to share files, new ways to find each other. Every time we heard anything new about the internet, it was always progress.
That lasted into the early teens and then things started changing. Things started stagnating. Now we’re well into the phase where every new piece of news we hear is negative. New legislations, new privacy intrusions, new restrictions, new technologies to lock content away and keep us from sharing, or seeing the content we were looking for. New ways to force ads.
At one point the Internet was my most favorite thing in the world. Now I don’t know if I even like it anymore. I certainly don’t look forward to hearing news about it. It’s sad, man. We’ve lost a lot. The mega corps took the internet from us, changed it from a million small sites that people created because they had big ideas, or were passionate about small ones, and turned it into a few enormous sites with no new ideas, no passion, just an insatiable desire for money.
We’re at the end of an era, and unlike the last 20 years of progress, I don’t think most of us will like what the next era brings.
It’s unencrypted
Is it encrypted while in transit between servers?
The answer is almost universally “no”, if you didn’t encrypt it yourself and are sending a cross-domain mail
I’m fairly sure connecting over TLS was the default last time I set up my server. But of course that only protects it from people snooping on the wires.
Yes, but that’s almost certainly you connecting to the pop3 server (usually indeed provides TLS), or the server connecting to a dedicated smarthost for delivery (sometimes does as well). But mail exchange between MTAs that don’t use smarthosts but reach the MX destination directly is mostly unencrypted, through port 25