Slashdot Mirror
UK Politician Criticised For Using Hotmail
nk497 writes "The UK justice secretary Jack Straw has been criticised for using Hotmail as his official government email account after he apparently fell foul of a Nigerian spammer in a phishing attack. A security researcher said using such an account not only left the government in security trouble, but meant any emails sent could not be necessarily accessed via the Freedom of Information Act."
That's why Sarah Palin did. She got hacked, too.
Unfortunately, government email systems are often _not_ as secure or reliable as those of such public systems. I've seen corporate and governmental systems where the It managers regularly lose email and find it impossible to recover, where their mailbox space is extremely small, where they will be censured if they receive or send personal email from that account and where the difference between personal and work email blurs and causes confusion, where the work system cannot handle usefully large attachments, and where they are still using POP{ email with the inevitable tendency of POP clients to be configured, by default to remove _all_ email from the server, permanently.
Combine this with the stunning instability of Outlook mail folders and their tendency to corrupt themselves, and you have an unusable service best replaced, quietly, by an outside service if you want to actually get any work done.