I doubt it; POP3 and SMTP are plaintext. Put a few wiretap in at major colos; build a few data centers, maintain a couple of essentially very large hashtables a

I doubt it; POP3 and SMTP are plaintext. Put a few wiretap in at major colos; build a few data centers, maintain a couple of essentially very large hashtables and it seems plausible that they could instantly pull up email contents. It'd be a bit bigger scale than GMail search or whatever corporations use for e-Discovery in Outlook, but it'd be plausible. Whether the government allocated budget to such a contraption is another matter; I think that would be a bigger concern than the technical plausibility of "store everyone's email for all time in perpetuity". I mean, if GMail was supposed to fulfill that vision (ha!) then it can't possibly be unreasonable for a determined government to build it.