> I don't recall deliberately reading any, but having my friends' personal messages sitting on my server in plain text format just seemed weird and icky and wro

> I don't recall deliberately reading any, but having my friends' personal messages sitting on my server in plain text format just seemed weird and icky and wrong. It's not icky and wrong, it's part and parcel of the ethics of managing user's data. I've had access to corporate user's e-mail at various companies for decades, access to my entire family's e-mail (my wife, parents, siblings -- I host it for them), access to corporate instant messaging logs, and a whole slew of other data ... ... and I can definitively state that I've never read any of it without prior permission, and I've never been remotely tempted. It's no different than having access to someone's mail, being handed the keys to a friend's house to house-sit their cats, or having someone hand you their mobile phone and then step away. As a matter of ethics, courtesy, and decorum, you simply don't look where you shouldn't. Even for corporate e-mail, where we have an absolute legal right to look at e-mail, it's simply not something you do without a legal justification that outweighs the right to personal privacy -- which is why hosting your personal e-mail with a third-party corporation is a bad idea if you don't want them digging through it. > I'm sure people will object to this opinion, but I don't think it's reasonable to send your messages to a third party's server in a totally open, unobscured format and consider those messages private. The difference is that a third-party corporation like Microsoft or Google have very different ideas of ethics, courtesy, and decorum than your friends or even your employer. In short, given the ability and even the legal right to engage in privacy-snooping behavior, everyone is not created equal, and not all relationships have the sort of constraints that we would (and I posit, should) expect.