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Mail always saved in plain-text?
| Posted by anubis2010, 03-08-2014, 03:42 PM |
| I have a shared hosting account at a very fine hosting provider. As I was poking around my home directory via FTP, I found out that email is saved on the file system in plain text. As it's (probably) a generic cPanel setup, does this mean it's like this everywhere?
To be more specific...
The location is ~/mail/domain_name/account_name
Each directory (be it email account or a mail folder on the server) has the following structure:
courierimapkeywords (dir)
cur (dir)
new (dir)
tmp (dir)
courierimapacl (file)
courierimapuiddb (file)
maildirfolder (file)
The "cur" directory contains plain-text files which are in fact emails.
I thought this would be encrypted in this day and age...
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| Posted by devonblzx, 03-08-2014, 07:08 PM |
| That is interesting but mail in general is pretty insecure. Mail is transferred in plain text when sent from server to server. Someone snooping in the middle of the route can read emails.
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| Posted by anubis2010, 03-09-2014, 08:50 AM |
| So the safest part of email is between your email client app using SSL and the SMTP/IMAP server you're connecting to? Then it's transferred in plain text, and in turn stored in plain text on the destination server?
Do the "big players" (Gmail, Outlook.com, 1and1...) also store email in this fashion?
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| Posted by bear, 03-09-2014, 09:11 AM |
| In a nutshell, yes. Unless you encrypt the email itself using something like PGP, it's plain text. Using SSL/TLS to fetch or send only encrypts the transaction, not the contents that are stored.
I'd venture a guess that they do.
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| Posted by Preetam, 03-09-2014, 11:05 AM |
| Google uses their proprietary BigTable storage system for Gmail and other services. How they store emails is really, really complicated for the average user.
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