>>Not really. What happened here is that Governor Palin used an email service that has a long history of security problems. And using ANY third party email system leaves you open to having the people that run the place.<<
My analogy stands. I have never in my life met a person who could do what these people claim to have done. I have also never in my life met a person who could effectively disable an alarm system and pick a lock.
This took special skills. It is also a break-in through locked doors. Your arguments are simply that she should have used a better lock and alarm company. The good news is that from what I am seeing, nothing of real value was “stolen”.
As with so many of the attacks against her, this really plays into her personna as “just like the rest of us”. We can relate to what happened to her.
I have. A lot. It's not that hard especially if you have physical access to the mail server. I've hacked the account of a deceased person so that the survivors could get to the deceased's email. (I was the admin at an ISP. It was legal.)
Your arguments are simply that she should have used a better lock and alarm company.
My argument is that too many people, the governor (and apparently you) have a false sense of security about third-party email systems. They aren't secure. They've never been secure.
Any email stored on a server is accessible by the people that have access to that server. End of story.
Even if it's encrypted it can still be deleted. That's called a Denial of Service attack.
So, yes, she's just like 90% of the Internet using public that assume that things are just peachy. Too many people trust the big webmail providers. They haven't earned that trust. In fact, they've shown many times that they aren't worthy of trust.
If you can't run your own server, use a server that someone you trust owns. That might be a friend, or a neighbor or a local ISP. They tend to be a little more careful since people can show up with pitchforks if they screw up.
The big providers count on the fact that most people don't understand security. So if your account gets hacked, so what? What are you going to do, stop using them? They have millions of other users. They don't care.