AT&T Community Forums

AT&T emails are NOT secure

It is a shame that AT&T is not encrypting email messages while they’re in transit, leaving them wide open to eavesdropping. Guys, wake up! This is the 21st century, and personal electronic communications are no longer sent in plaintext over the Internet! When is AT&T going to enable StartTLS on the att.net email servers?

StartTLS encrypts email messages between sender and receiver, and ensures the email hasn’t been read by other parties on the way to the user's inbox. But this requires the email provider to support TLS.

Att.net emails are not secure because att.net servers don't support #StartTLS. Not using an email provider that supports StartTLS is like broadcasting to the entire world all your email messages for companies and governments snooping online.

Guys, seriously! StartTLS encryption is the industry standard, widely supported, and it has been around for 15 years!

You can learn more about StartTLS from Wikipedia here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STARTTLS

I need a follow up from an AT&T representative on this: please pass this note verbatim to the AT&T information security officer/chief. If this is not the right place to feedback about this, please let me know where I can write to. Thanks!

Responses

ATTDmitriyCM

Former Community Manager

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10.4K Messages

10 years ago

Hello randyb_1,

Thank you for posting. Since att.net email service is provided by Yahoo, there is actually a forum for email feedback and suggestions. It's located here. I'm not aware of any better place to discuss those kinds of issues.

Thanks,

Dmitriy

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randyb_1

Teacher

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19 Messages

10 years ago

Thanks for your assistance ATTDmitriyCM,

Yahoo email servers are secure with STARTTLS enabled, but att.net servers are not, as they are operated by AT&T, not Yahoo, so the emails are wide open to snooping. It's AT&T who needs to enable STARTTLS on the att.net servers.

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