Don't Use Webmail if You Don't Need It – or POP It

Не используйте вэбмэйл, если он вам не нужен или используйте POP-протокол для доступа к нему

Webmail poses a serious security trade-off for those concerned about a government adversary

Webmail is usually free, very easy to use, and super-convenient, especially if you want the ability to access your email from several different computers or mobile devices. However, deleting your email from your provider's servers as soon as you've downloaded — a critical step to protecting your email's privacy against the government — is hard if not impossible to do when you use a webmail service like Gmail or Yahoo! Mail, especially if you want to maintain access to a copy of that email. Since you view your email in your browser rather than downloading it to email client software, the only conveniently accessible copy of your email is going to be the one you store with your provider.

If you take the idea of a government adversary seriously, webmail is a very bad risk. The government is hundreds if not thousands of times more likely to try and obtain your stored email rather than wiretap it. Indeed, the reason that the number of wiretaps on electronic communications is so low is because it's so easy to obtain the same information from the provider's storage.

So, if you think that government adversaries may pose a threat to your privacy, we strongly recommend that you not use webmail for any unencrypted sensitive communications, unless you simply can't live your life or do your job without an easy-to-access-anywhere inbox. If you really don't need that kind of access and usually access your mail from the same computer, the convenience of webmail probably isn't worth the risk.

If you do use a webmail account, though, one way of mitigating the risk is to avoid using the web interface and instead download your emails directly to your email client software using POP and immediately delete them from the provider's server. This option may not be available from all webmail providers, but it is offered by major providers such as Gmail, Microsoft and Yahoo!. You'll lose the convenient access to past messages via the web, and it might not be free (Microsoft and Yahoo! charge a fee of $19.95 per year for POP service through Hotmail Plus and Yahoo! Mail Plus, while Google's Gmail service offers the option at no cost), but you'll still have cheap and reliable email service.

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