NHS email encryption

[Dave Howe]

Roland Perry wrote:
> In article <46CEE726.5000806@defoam.net>, "Dr Adrian Midgley (In the 
> office)" <amidgley2@defoam.net> writes
>> Any patient identifiable information sent from an ordinary email 
>> account (eg ekcpct.nhs.uk or gp-g80000.nhs.uk) is not fully encrypted 
>> and therefore open to interception and would constitute sending 
>> details outside the EEA.
> 
> Hold on, are they saying that the server that does nhs.uk emails is 
> located outside the EEA?!?
> 
> mail.nhs.uk is allegedly 212.137.44.179, which is somewhere in cw.net; 
> Sheffield according to one geolocation tool, Manchester another, London 
> a third (did anyone say geolocation was an inexact science?)

   I *do* know the nhs.net official mailservers have been causing us 
problems - they assert their wilingness/ability to do opportunistic 
crypto in their EHLO replies, but then drop the connection if you 
attempt to do a STARTTLS from outside of the nhs.... This is apparently 
a deliberate security misfeature, no idea how or why they would 
implement that.