Yahoo, Gmail Asked To Route All Overseas Mails Through Servers In India

New Delhi, India — The Government of India in a bid to have an iron grip over instances of terror activities planned on the internet, is now relentlessly haunting the digital communication in India. Now, major email service providers such as Google, Yahoo and others were asked by the Indian government to route all emails accessed in India through servers located in the country to provide quicker access to security agencies, media reports said Tuesday.

This latest request is also applicable for those mail accounts that has been registered overseas.

According to reports appearing in The Times of India and other notable dailies reported that the latest move comes in the wake of instances where security agencies were unable to gain real-time access to some emails accessed from India, as part of an anti-terror investigation, as the accounts were registered overseas.

Government Of India Vs. Gmail & Yahoo: Image Credit: (Deccan Herald)

During a recent high-level meeting that took place in the office of Union Home Secretary R K Singh, the Department of Information Technology (DIT) was asked to pursue the matter at the earliest with the content providers like Gmail, Yahoo & others, a report citing unnamed sources said.

According to TOI reporting that the issue surfaced when security agencies in India failed to access accounts of suspected members of terrorist group Indian Mujahideen during a surveillance period. Besides, when the content provider were approached, the sleuths were informed that in order to view the e-mails, which had been accessed from India, they need to request permission from the European nation where the server of the e-mail accounts were based to access the messages, official sources said.

During the meeting, a top official of the government-mandated information technology security organization CERT-In (the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team) 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 might find itself in a better position as compared to others. Citing minutes of the meeting, which said that Yahoo accounts registered outside India and subsequently accessed from India are routed through servers outside India, it stated.

As an action article of the meeting; DIT will now ask Gmail, Yahoo and other similar content providers to route all the emails accessed in India to route through servers physically located in India.

“It was decided to advice Yahoo, Gmail, etc that all e-mail messages accessed from India should be routed through servers in India,” said the minutes.

Moreover, it is not just Web mail service providers that are being targeted by the government to set up servers within the country. Other internet services companies have faced an increasingly stringent set of regulations in India, seen by experts as a combination of escalating security threats and unease over anti-government sentiments.

Besides, BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIM) finally relented to the India government’s requests to set up a server in India. Thus, it is now clear that Google, Yahoo and other content providers too will have to follow Government’s instructions.