I have no illegal or incriminating emails. So I'm not worried about that. What bothers me is that overly broad requests would see all sorts of my personal life unrelated to the request. What pizza I ask my wife to order, private jokes I may share with my close friends, and things like that. Stuff that is my (and my family's) personal life.<p>None of that content is illegal or even unethical, but it's my personal data and I'm concerned that others will be looking over it or causing it to be some kind of public record because they are too lazy to filter out the unrelated stuff and just want to enter all of it as exhibit A.<p>I expect (hope) that strong laws will be introduced soon to address these issues. We're all in the same boat with cloud data and big corps being the gatekeepers.
It would be great if more email clients had encryption built in, and encrypted emails to people with known public keys.<p>Barring that, perhaps something like a peer to peer network where messages are automatically encrypted and addressed to a public key could work. Those emails could then float around the p2p network until a client with that public key joined, and downloaded that message, decrypting it with their private key obviously.
It's not really private if you are using a freemail service like Google or Yahoo.<p>I am more interested in the law, for those who run their own SMTP and IMAP servers.