My brother wanted to send me a sensitive document, so he followed the suggestion by his provider (GMX) to use their feature called “registered mail”) (“Einschreiben”). Here’s how it works:
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The sender composes an Email and checks the option “registered mail”
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GMX stores the email on their servers, generates an access code, and sends the access code with a URL to the intended recipient — plain text, of course.
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The recipient surfs to the URL and accepts (or declines).
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GMX then acknowledges acceptance to the sender and forwards the email to the original recipient address — plain text, of course.
I suppose the feature does what the name suggests, namely to offer the sender a way to check whether the recipient has received the email. What pisses me off is that they sell it as a way to securely send emails on the Internet.
I think providers spreading fud like this should have their “licence” revoked and be condemned to practice encryption with an abacus over a 2400 baud modem line!
PS: If this isn’t bad, the email sent to the intended recipient
doesn’t properly encode special characters in the headers, which is
why some content scanners (like my amavisd-new) will
discard or bounce it.
