Quote:
Originally Posted by theducks
When you make a deliberate RECORD (use) of the conversation (in the USA), you need at least:
1) a court wiretap order
2) permission of BOTH parties
If you have a Gmail account and I don't, Google does NOT have a TOU agreement from both parties.
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An email exchange isn't the same as a real-time phone conversation, though. It's like sending a letter. Or in this case, it's like sending a letter to a person in a different country with different regulations.
After you sent your email, then at most it becomes "property" of the receiver, and if the receiver's mail provider requires the receiver to accept that their email can be read, then it is probably is fine, legally.
There is an important aspect here: The provider of the receiver's mail service is not the only one who has access to your emails in plain text. Every ISP (not the same as the mail provider) whose network your email is routed through has access to your email contents if you are not encrypting it. Mail protocols are plain text.
So sending an email from A to B may well mean that there are ten other networks inbetween whose admins could, if they wanted, effortlessly read, analyse, store or otherwise process your emails. There has never been privacy in that area, unless you actively ensure it (by using tools like Pretty Good Privacy).