How private are PMs

[debest]

I getting the feeling that some people here have some pent up angst towards one another. Fuck it!! Lets just get it out in the open and have a good old fashioned shit sling....

[debest]

your not so sure of much are you? Now if you dont be a good boy ill remove you from my extensive list of friends. I think your on it although i cant remember.

thats terribly upsetting,
Westside.

Westie.....is it too hot for leather pants you reckon??

[Patricia]

Just don't do bad things and it doesn't matter, that's how i feel. I use hotmail and various other sites like that and sometimes I think, what if they are reading my email? But they almost certainly aren't and I reckon and even if they were, I don't really care as i'm not doing anything illegal etc, so if someone did read my email it wouldn't really matter anyway.

[Mousey]

Trust no-one, it's the Internets

[northernwaster]

Having ran a small local sporting forum for a number of years (with about 100 active members) using phpBB it is brave and easy to read PMs, but mods no only people with access to the hosting/forum code. Thats the reason why I gave it up and passed it on to someone else in the end too much hassle from members accusing me of allsorts and because I couldnt give an iron-clad guarentee that PM's couldnt be read by me. Not that I ever did (well, other than to see if I acually could!)

[El Gordo]

The question is how many people can read your pm's, and the answer is probably far more than you might think. Probably none of these people do, but they can. So don't write anything very private in them.

Here's a list, starting with the obvious and then continuing to some you might not have thought about.
- Patricia can and anyone she authorises can. She's posted above, so not much more to say about this one.
- Her hosting company can. E-I runs off hosted servers. The company which owns the servers can obviously read anything stored on them, including your pm's.
- Your ISP, the recipient's ISP, the hosting company's ISP, and lots of companies in between. All of them can read your pm's as they travel. They can because your pm's aren't encrypted, just sent in plain text. There are probably a lot of computers between yours and E-I's server, 15 in my case, and anyone who controls one of those can read your pm's, as can the people who control the wires, satellites, etc.
- Various spy agencies can read your pm's. At a minimum, I'm sure the National Security Agency in the US is scanning them automatically. E-I's servers are in the States, and they monitor all network traffic coming in and out.
- Probably your neighbours, colleagues, family, etc. can. This depends on how your network connection works and how technically skilled they are. Snooping network connections is generally not very difficult, if you're close by and know what you are doing. For obvious reasons I'm not going to post instructions here.

So all of these people or organisations can read your pm's. The question is how many of them want to. Probably none. If you're running the Irish branch of Al Qaeda then doing it by pm is probably a bad idea.

One final note: Patricia recommends deleting messages for privacy. Don't bother. It wouldn't prevent any of the above from reading your pm's.

[EmeraldWarrior]

I would imagine M15 keep an eye on proceedings hereand you dont have to be doing anything illeagle for those feckes to nail you.Some one with a spouse and family would be quite useful to those punks.So anyone in the North East of the country be aware,you could be putting yourself in an compromising postion.

[rover]

OK - sticky one here, but how private are our PMs to each other. Who, if any one, are privee to the content within a so called private message. If I was to confide with Milfie or Fussy or even DeEgiit, who else can see this. Do our trusted Mods have access to this. My username and Password are registered on EI, can anyone with behind the scenes permissions access this? What exactly can I be assured to be the access level.

If they could read my pm's, I would be finished, they'd have me committed, please tell me they can't.

[Westsidex]

only people with access to the hosting/forum code.

On this site, the only reason that E-I would check pms is in the case of threats or nasty stuff or similar. I have absolutly no doubt that they wouldnt bother even checking otherwise. FFS "The Sweetie" (reg tm) seems like she has enough stuff to do besides creating more.

pms are just that here - private,
Westside.

PS thanks for the heads up on mods. Some ppl seem to think we have keys to the office.

[northernwaster]

Thats it though, its not the fact of whither they do or not, its the fact that they can that upsets people. But if your passing sensitive information over a website that doesnt even have a privacy policy (not that they mean anything really) then you need your head looked at.

And dont take that as a dig at E-I, I love it as is