"SMTP has outlived its usefulness" (was: Forwarding services)

Posted Jan 18, 2026 15:28 UTC (Sun) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
In reply to: "SMTP has outlived its usefulness" (was: Forwarding services) by nivedita76
Parent article: A note for MXroute users

If governments wanted to read people's communications, they'd encourage the use of SMTP. Most emails are not end-to-end encrypted, and it's dead easy to intercept emails. You just make email providers give law enforcement a "lawful interception" method.

Back when I was in the email security business, our product had this feature, requested by a number of customers. We also ran a hosted email filtering service and while we ourselves never used the feature and were never asked to use it, it's likely that some of our customers who ran the software on-premises did use the feature.