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Is email traffic typically encrypted between major providers? E.g. could a network attacker, located between Google and Microsoft, intercept unencrypted traffic
by eslaught 13y ago
Is email traffic typically encrypted between major providers? E.g. could a network attacker, located between Google and Microsoft, intercept unencrypted traffic between gmail and hotmail addresses?
- SoftwareMaven 13y agoIt depends. Bigger providers like Google typically prefer to use TLS, but there are a great many smaller providers who do not. In order to keep everything flowing, there has to be the ability to fall back to unencrypted messages.
- pjqwdpjoqw 13y agoIt is often encrypted, but since the encryption is negotiated using STARTTLS it can easily be stripped by an active attacker. It works fine against passive attackers.
- kintamanimatt 13y agoSMTP relay is almost always unencrypted. The client that connects to the SMTP server may connect via an encrypted connection though, but that's mostly to prevent snooping on the client's local network.