Indian govt to ask Yahoo, Google to route emails through servers in India

Web mail service providers such as Google, Yahoo, and others will be asked to route all emails accessed in India through servers located in the country – even if the mail accounts that receive and send them were registered outside it, reports The Times of India.

The Department of Information Technology (DIT) has been tasked to approach the providers with this request after the decision was made at a high-level meeting in the office of Union Home Secretary R K Singh.

At that meeting the participants also learned from the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team’s director that Yahoo already routes all correspondence to and from accounts registered in India through a server located in the country, but does not do the same for accounts registered outside of India, but accessed from the country.

The decision to request this of the providers was taken after Indian intelligence agencies failed to access the email accounts of suspected Indian Mujahideen terrorists because they needed the permission from a European nation where the email server was located and the account opened to do so.

The news broke shortly after BlackBerry developer RIM set up a server in Mumbai so that law-enforcement and intelligence officers can intercept suspect communications.