What's my ISP up to?

I, Credulous — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 11:49:20 -0800

Starting this week, we had to "register" our non-@mybigtimeserviceprovider.com email addresses in order to be able to send out email. Both my wife and I have our own domains that we use for web sites and our personal email addresses.
When those domains were initially set up, we were able to simply point our email clients to our remote domain email servers (mail.domainname.com) for outgoing and inbound email. We happily sent and received our email through that remote server, over our home connection.
Then our ISP put a block on that kind of activity: though we were still able to receive email from mail.domainname.com, we had to use our ISP's SMTP server (we'll call it smtp.mybigtimeserviceprovider.com) to send our mail. This was annoying. It also seemed to me that despite the ISP's assurances that this was for our protection, it actually increased the likelihood that my outbound emails would look like spam to people I sent them to, as they arrived from one SMTP server, bearing an email address from another server. (correct me if this is wrong thinking)

Last week, my wife, in whose name our household ISP account is held, received an email informing her that (paraphrased here, I don't have the email at work):

"We have noticed that you often use non-@mybigtimeserviceprovider.com email addresses for your outgoing mail** and want you to know that, due to certain new security features we've installed for your protection you will need to add these addresses to a list of verified addresses through our webmail panel. Failure to add these addresses will result in you getting a 503: unable to send error message from our servers for your outbound mail."

Is there any good reason that they would need to have a record of my personal, non-@mybigtimeserviceprovider.com email addresses "for security reasons?"

This is feeling like the straw that breaks my back where this service provider is concerned...

** WTF? they're spying on my email addresses? what else are they scanning for?

hacking someone's email: Uncool or illegal?

Jazz Hands — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 18:38:19 -0800

What are the legal penalties, if any, for guessing a former spouse's email password correctly and using that access to gather information for child/spousal support court case. "Someone that I know" (not me) has been divorced almost a year, but her former husband has been being a complete ass about paying support on time and paying her settlement for their divorce. He said he wasn't working and didn't have money, etc.

She got some paperwork from his lawyer and it had an email address for him, she wondered if he was stupid enough to use the same email password and he was. She found emails from his new job(she didn't know he had gotten) detailing his whole package: salary, benefits, retirement, profit sharing etc.

She also read emails from his current wife that went back to when she and her former husband were still married, while they were going to counselling trying to save the marriage. These notes clearly showed a sexual relationship was already going on between them.

I advised her to stop torturing herself by continually reading them. I want her to move on and let it go. Yes, he should be a better man and pay for his responsibilities, and she found out he has a job, let the judge come down on him for being a lying snake. But don't ever let on that she broke into his email, I don't even know if that is illegal or not though.

So, is it illegal to break into email or not? Is it just not cool? Is it the idiot-who-doesn't-protect-himself's fault? What would mefi do?

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What's my ISP up to?

hacking someone's email: Uncool or illegal?