New law to trak emails...

Originally Posted by Miss Alpinestarhero

The only question I have is...what is the point of tracking emails if the content isn't looked at? What is the actual point of that? If it is just emails sent/received (addresses/date/time) then I would have thought companies were doing that already?

The point is that if they find someone & prove them to be a terrorist, and this terrorist discloses their email address (or the spys find it out), then you have a list of other suspects to watch more closely.

Originally Posted by Miss Alpinestarhero

I personally think that they wouldn't even be able to achieve such a thing due to the sheer volume of emails sent everyday. Where would it all be stored?

Each ISP is to store their own data, thus offloading storage requirements. The government (sorry, we) are paying for this scheme to be setup, to the tune of £25 million.

Originally Posted by timwilky

I run my own SMTP servers at home. Mail comes direct from 3rd parties to me. there are nobody elses servers involved.

As already stated above, monitoring traffic, and you don't need to worry about the port, most ISPs can tell bittorrent traffic for example, regardless of what port it's on. Active filtering/logging already takes place, down to the level of the PSTN circuit ID (if applicable) being recorded as well.

Originally Posted by timwilky

Next if I feel like I want to set up naughty mail between me and my mate, we simply install an AES256 VPN between us.

Not secure enough, trust me. Think again.

Originally Posted by timwilky

Plenty of companies run their own mail servers.

The wording of the rules is that every company, not every Internet Service Provider must record the data, starting from March this year.

Originally Posted by ogden

Easy. Transparent redirect by the ISP so all connections out from your machine to port 25 are terminated on the ISP's mail relays. They then log traffic in the usual way and forward the mail on. I've seen it done plenty of times.
OK, so all they're logging is mail you're sending, not receiving, but that's half the battle won.

Using the same methods you described, you don't need to worry about ports, and it's just as easy to track receipts as it is sent mails.

Originally Posted by ogden

As much as I don't like the idea of every email I send being tracked, it's no differeent to the logging of phone call termination info by telcos and they've been doing that for years.

Bingo! It's no different to what we're already doing for other forms of communication, so why fight it? What have you got to hide? Wait, I've heard that argument somewhere before.

Originally Posted by timwilky

The bad boys are not going to be easily monitored by simply tracking SMTP traffic. Suddenly they are going to have to put every packet through some analysis to see if it may be part of a mail dialog.

Who says this applies only to SMTP? The wording is emails... so that's POP3 & IMAP at least as well as SMTP.

Originally Posted by timwilky

So would I then use mail. Could I simply not ftp an encrypted file across an encrypted network if I wanted to send my mate a message. or would I use a private protocol of my own design to further encrypted the bits being sent, disassemble the communication and passed psuodo random pieces. etc.

No point going to that extent, when you can just use Jabber. Afterall, it's an XML based comms protocol, so you just change the tags to suit, draw up your own DTD, and it looks like you're sending XML back & forth (we do this at work, for talking to each other and financial data from machines to our servers). Optionally encrypt it if you want, but who will start tracking XML files even in plain text? There's just too much of it now with things like Ajax being popular.

Originally Posted by ogden

The whole UK network will not grind to a halt. The *vast* majority of email traffic is already logged either on sending (most people use either a web-based mail system or send through their ISP's smarthost) or receipt (again, web-based mail or POP3 from their ISP's mail servers). The only differences are the redirection of mail not currently relayed and an extension of the log retention period. Big deal, not.

Only half right, there's no redirection required, it can be transparently monitored without redirection. But to increase monitoring isn't that hard, especially not to this level.

I already send/receive mails that this plan would not be able to see anyway, and non of them involve blowing myself up (yet, anyway). I just see this as another way to track the already law abiding majority. Maybe they just want to see when someone steps over the line and starts being naughty, without the knowledge to keep themselves away from the law.

Did we vote these muppets in?

Someone should protest outside the houses of parliament ... oh no ... that's illegal isn't it.

Originally Posted by Baph

The point is that if they find someone & prove them to be a terrorist, and this terrorist discloses their email address (or the spys find it out), then you have a list of other suspects to watch more closely.

Terrorists being such a big threat and all ... thank god we can work out where they get their fake meds