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Comment by ricardobeat | Hacker News Reader

> I discovered my second attempt to contact the user about this problem in their Junk folder tonight.

Peeking into a user's mail box? I know it's all plain text anyway, but this article makes me feel a bit uneasy.

There's a difference between message contents and meta-data. Even the logs often contain the subject, folder, and TO/FROM frields.

It is pretty hard to diagnose issues without at least gathering basic information on the state of an account.

Not really sure I see the issue. If Google, for example, had an issue and they needed to examine the meta data surrounding individual pieces of my email I'd likely be alright with that as long as they didn't read the message's content/body or any attached files which I view as quite private.

The subject + from + to fields already expose a lot of information, and should be considered just as private as a message's content. I would expect it to be at least truncated in some way to prevent rough employees from accessing user accounts, still debuggable just as easily.

I fully expect if my mail client is acting up, they'll turn on debug logs which have enough information to troubleshoot anything. The information he 'peeked' at was incidental to debug mode.

He's referring to telemetry (logging). It's like an Apache log. Nothing to be uneasy about.

Server logs never expose identifiable information or any user-provided content.

Email metadata and URLs are equally capable of having identifiable info and user-provided content.

You can be pretty sure that your emails (regardless of where it's stored, MS, Yahoo, Google or your ISP) can be read by the operations/support team at any time.

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