That's actually pretty sinister. I'm in Norway, and although there hasn't been any push to centralize and consolidate the e-mail servers in the name of spam, the EU data retention directive was passed here in April after lots of resistance.

I hoped that our neighbors were in a better position to fight these attacks on liberty online. Is privacy on the web really under this much pressure in Finland?

Finland is pretty bad when it comes to these things. They block political criticism against its web censorship policy: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikinews/en/wiki/Finnish_intern...

You may consider it sinister, but it's a fairly common practice all over the World for residential ISPs.

"Must use archiving ISP mail servers" is sinister.

Email is a postcard, not a securely sealed envelope. If you want it to be securely sealed use PGP, then the archiving doesn't matter.

"Potentially troubling" maybe. I see no evidence that their motives are sinister.

I'm on Sonera network at home and able to use port 25. Although at work Elisa blocks it, so I guess it is per ISP basis.

Interesting. Other people are reporting on their forums that port 25 is allowed only to their own mail servers (http://www5.sonera.fi/keskustele/viewtopic.php?f=57&t=10... ). More similar references are easily found using google.

I'm on HOAS(provided by Sonera) network, I guess maybe thats why.