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Posted by Todd H. on January 3, 2006, 2:41 pm
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> 1. what are some of the most basic and necessary internet/mail/chat
> privacy precautions a mac user should do to help prevent a third party
> from snooping on one's private communications? - certain programs
> installed? particular computer settings? routing thru a certain type
> of server (and how)?
Look into GPG if email privacy is something you wish to attain.
Caveat: you better be communicating with similar minded people.
http://gnupg.org/
> 2. is there any way to access websites that are blocked for some
> reason?
Depends entirely on the reason and method of blocking.
> 3. how does email travel? does it all go to some fairly central hub of
> computers and then get dispersed from there, or do some emails go
> directly to the address indicated?
It gets passed along a chain of SMTP servers from sender to receiver.
THere is no central server it goes through, but if yer in the US, one
can probably assume the spooks have hooks into significantly large
ISP's and are watching.
If you look at the _full_ headers of any email you receive, read the
Received: headers from the bottom to the top to see how an individual email
traveled.
> 4. only recently (6mos) some of my earthlink emails take ~12hrs before
> i receive them. i spoke with earthlink, they sent a test email which
> happened to come right thru right away, so they said 'no problem,
> working fine' and hung up. but ~10% of the time it take hours to
> receive an earthlink email. 1p-5p seems to be when this happens
> most. i don't notice this on other email accts i have.
Look at the problem messages and their received headers and see if you
can localize the common features of the messages that get delayed.
Perhaps an intermediate smtp server is really crappy with one of the
folks you correspond with, or there are DNS issues or something like
that. IT's hard to say.
--
Todd H.
http://www.toddh.net/
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