Yahoo, Gmail should route all mails through Indian servers

Internet content providers Yahoo, Gmail and others would be asked to route all emails accesed in India through the country even if the mail account is registered outside the country. The move comes in the wake of instances where security agencies could not have a real-time access to some emails as they were registered outside the country but were opened in India.

During a recent high-level meeting held in the office of Union Home Secretary R K Singh, the Department of Information Technology (DIT) was asked to take up the matter at the earliest with the content providers. During the meeting, director general from CERT-in informed that content provider Yahoo automatically locates all email accounts registered in India to the server in India, minutes of the meeting said.

However, Yahoo accounts registered outside India and subsequently accessed from India are routed through servers outside India, it said. "It was decided to advice Yahoo, Gmail etc that all emails accessed from India should be routed through servers in India," it said, adding that the DIT would take up the matter with the content providers.

The need for this was felt after security agencies failed to access accounts of suspected terrorists of Indian Mujahideen during the surveillance period as the same had been opened in a European country. When the content provider was approached, the sleuths were told that in order to see the mails, which had been accessed from India, a request to a European nation where the server was based, was required, official sources said.