Quoting coderman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
that really is the crux; email passes through so many possible hops,
usually unecrypted (and even when the payload itself is encrypted,
subject and other headers are not).
Riseup, the other tech collectives named on the website of riseup and
many (could someone confirm this, is "many" correct?) universities are
using a technique called StartTLS. You may find more information here:
[1] & [2]
So, for example, if you are sending a mail from riseup to nadir.org, a
tech collective located in Hamburg / Germany, you _can't_ read the
subject, the message itself, and the sender and receiver from
"outside", which means for example if your are wiretapping the
connection.
Of course this isn't 100% secure, and yes it can be attacked, and it
doesn't work if you send a mail to hotmail or other shitty mail
providers. But maybe better than send all the traffic unencrypted
trough the net.
Just my 0.02, idefix :)
P.S.: I will add a part of a mail header using TLS. Mail came from
so36.net, tech collective located in Berlin / Germany, and was
distributed to riseup. And sorry for my bad english...
[1] http://sial.org/howto/openssl/tls-name/
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_SMTP
Received: from lists.so36.net (lists.so36.net [83.223.73.118])
(using TLSv1 with cipher DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA (256/256 bits))
(Client CN "lists.so36.net", Issuer "lists.so36.net" (not verified))
by mx1.riseup.net (Postfix) with ESMTP id AB84B5704B5
for <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; Fri, 22 Aug 2008 16:47:18 -0700 (PDT)
