At 11:24 AM 12/16/2000 -0800, Eric Murray wrote:
Only by running your own mail or news server can you prevent the ISP from monitoring your email or news reading.
Sorry to entering this thread so late but I had to bite on these comments. I have been in and out of the ISP business for the last 5 years. In my last real job I was responsible for a tech support team. Tech support personnel in ISPs are typically an entry level position with only slightly better starting wages. I couldn't get most of the techs to read what I wanted them to read and I would be surprised if any of them did any snooping. You spend most of the time on the phone with 12 O'clock flashers, people who live with every appliance in their house flashing 12:00. A lot of calls are from Outlook Express users who receive a 2 MB graphics file and are pissed off when they can't download it in 30 seconds with their 33.6 kbps modem. Outlook Express doesn't give you any progress indication. They call and want you to read their mail to them over the phone. A few calls like this you just don't ever want to look at anyone's mail any more. News servers don't tend to keep logs, you look at a newsgroup and there are 3000 messages in the group, that would be 3000 lines in a log file. We would turn that one off real fast. Mailservers...?? Ever looked at a "messages" log on a Sendmail server? Even with GREP there ain't no way to get useful information there. The log files are probably on a 5-week rotation so after 5 weeks their gone. Dialup access logs tend to be kept so we can pursue the hackin bastards plus some ISPs use them for billing. Sorry, no love lost for hackers after you have called a few and attempted to talk to them. Everyone is in denial, " I didn't do that". Web access logs are usually kept for a while but without a stats package they are mostly gibberish. I would bet most hosting companies don't keep logs unless the customer pays extra for a stats package. I wouldn't worry about most ISP invading your privacy. Most of them are too busy getting calls from 12:00 O'clock flashers and, my personal favourite, the caller who blamed us for uploading porn onto their computer. Raymond D. Mereniuk Raymond@fbn.bc.ca History of a Telco, A Fairy Tale http://www.fbn.bc.ca/telcohis.html