this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2026
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I might be out of the loop on how email works, but doesn’t it hop between several other email servers on its way from Alice to Bob (and at least some of it must still be unencrypted)? If so and given google’s scale you could probably just assume that even if they’re not your inbox they’re going to be at least handling many if not most emails along the way.
That was the theory, nowadays moest email goes from google or microsoft to google or microsoft. At least 99% of the rest goes directly from the senders provider to the recipients provider. Afaik none of the larger providers still accept non-TLS connections.
Yeah that’s what I’m saying. Even if you’re not using one of the big providers there’s a good chance they’re going to be at least handing it on its way to your self-hosted inbox, and its contents are unencrypted while they’re handling it (unless you encrypt the contents yourself). So there’s not much benefit to self hosting email if your goal is to keep your data out of big tech’s hands (and if that is your goal, don’t send anything important with email)
If neither the sender nor the recipient is hosted by google the email is never going to reach googles servers. It will go directly from the sender provider to the recipients provider.