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Comment by subsection1h | Hacker News Reader

Seeing people in this thread say that they delete all their emails is super weird. I'd like to know their job titles, ages, etc. Do they not use email to converse with their lawyers, business associates, etc.?

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Email is not secure and therefore not suitable for serious business use. Even if you encrypt your message in transit (which is hard when mailing third parties), your stored message is one missed security patch away from snooping eyes.

Email is for casual use only.

I’m a 40 years old programmer. I’ve never kept emails for more than a week. Everything is deleted once I have saved the attachments or replied to the mail.

Also I never had a lawyer or an associate, I only have friends.

I can’t delete or encrypt emails for the same reason. It’s a legal document, though I don’t know how it’s treated by the courts. Definitely it’s evidence.

A law/regulation that prevents you from even encrypting your backups? That sounds pretty weird.

No, I meant, the evidence is lost when using end to end encrypted email (like with PGP or proton): the server as a trusted third party doesn’t have access to the email in plaintext to confirm the message or document.

Absent specific archiving solutions, most providers don’t and wont care about third party legal disputes.

I’ve never heard this argument before. It’s routine in many regulated industries with de facto or legally required preservation mandates to encrypt email, often with S/MIME or sometimes something proprietary.

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