Iran will distribute state e-mail to all citizens

Iran continues to build its own separate Internet and the launch of state e-mail has become a new step. As reported by The Verge with reference to Reuters, Iran plans to give out to all its residents state e-mail addresses and use these addresses to communicate with them.

Although this will give the Iranian government a fairly progressive means of communicating with its people, there is a fear that the state will use it only as one of the ways to control people's personal lives. Iran promises to protect user privacy.

According to Reuters, data centers have been established throughout Iran to handle the traffic of the new service, which will be available at mail.post.ir. Although the launch of its mail is a sign that Iran continues to move in the direction of a closed Internet, the country's new president may be less interested in such plans.
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The Iranian government has long been working on a “national Intranet” that would allow Iranians to communicate with each other, but not with the outside world. Work on this project accelerated after the spread of the Stuxnet virus, allegedly directed against Iran’s nuclear project.

However, according to the Mehr News Agency, President-elect Hassan Rouhani stated that he believes that a strong government "does not interfere in the privacy of the people." This may mean a new turn of events when he takes office in August, but at the moment Iranian citizens are dealing with increased efforts to regulate their access to the Internet.