Snooping ISP admin??

Mark M. markm at voicenet.com
Tue Sep 24 03:55:01 PDT 1996


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On Mon, 23 Sep 1996, Michael E. Carboy wrote:

> Greetings All,
> 
> Question for the group:  I have encountered a situation that causes me
> to believe an ISP is snoopingthrough encrytped mail.  It seems that
> PGP'd mail has aroused the curiosity of an ISP (not hooked.net).. I have
> encountered "POP3 account in use by another user" several times in the
> past few days and I am the only user... wondering if that "in use"
> messsage is the result of a clumsy sysadmin being caught with his hand
> in the cookie jar.  Any thoughts from the group???  If those more
> knowledgeable than I deem these NOISE... my sincere apologies.

Any sysadmin using POP3 to snoop through your mail would have to be a complete
moron.  It's much easier to just "cat /usr/spool/mail/user" which is
undetectable.  The sysadmin could then use touch to set the "last read" value
to the previous value.  Anyone with complete access to the POP3 server would
be able to snoop through anyone's mail undetected.  My guess is that you are
getting that error from a stale lockfile.  If any sysadmin is snooping through
your mail, you wouldn't know it.

Mark
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