Quote:
Originally Posted by travfar
Well... actually no. The only popular email provider that does that is gmail. Yahoo and Hotmail are not over SSL. So email in general is not very secure to begin with. On your Kindle, perhaps less so. It depends on how Amazon is running as your proxy. If it's simply routing packets, that's one thing and then gmail would be secure. If it's acting as a full proxy, then no. Not at all. That's because as a full proxy, it's Amazon that has a SSL connection to Google. You might even have a SSL connection to Amazon, but Amazon has full access to your data. Here's my real world example. So you write a letter and seal it in an envelope. If Amazon is just routing packets then Amazon takes your letter and delivers it sealed to the recipient. If it's acting as a full proxy. Amazon opens up that letter, makes a copy and puts that copy in a sealed evelope and delivers it to the recipient. In the latter case, Amazon has full access to your data.
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Not really, the use of encryption and certificates makes impossible for any third party to snoop on the data being transmitted. The session key is known only by the client and server, so there is nothing Amazon can do with the data besides relaying it. They can't impersonate the mail server either without triggering an invalid certificate error.
Hotmail runs on plain HTTP by default, but it is possible (and recommended) to configure it to always use HTTPS.
As for Yahoo, it seems only its login page is encrypted, which prevents password sniffing but not much else. I recommend switching to another provider if security is important to you.