FG to Ban Yahoomail, Hotmail, Other Free emails, Creates 10,000 New .ng emails

Federal civil servants will soon be banned from using free email accounts like Yahoomail, hotmail in a fresh security ethos designed to permeate through all tiers of government and its agencies and protect state mechanism from deliberate and unintended abuse, Nigeria CommunicationsWeek can now reveal.
In place of the free email accounts, Galaxy Backbone Plc; a public enterprise under the supervision of the office of the secretary to the government, is set to create over 10,000 new .ng domain based email accounts for the public service organizations.
With the move, emails sent or received on free email account, no matter their content, are not public records because they are not owned or used by a government agency.
In other words, electronic communications will be owned, used, or retained by government only if they reside on a government server set up by Galaxy Backbone.
The creation of the emails will be implemented in stages over a period with enough room for flexibilities.
Critics of government are quick to dismiss the latest initiative and said it is a device by the government to avoid openness in the running of the state affairs.
But Nigeria CommunicationsWeek gathered that the creation of the new email addresses followed discovery that some civil servants have inadvertently transmitted sensitive government data and information through their own email address which pose national security challenges.
It is also a measure to tackle the menace of cyber criminals who set up fraudulent websites and have reduced Nigeria’s image among the comity of Nations.
Each ministry will now have customized email accounts that allow its civil servants to use the ministry’s name as their e-mail domain and in turn allow people to immediately recognize incoming e-mail messages´ origin. For example, [email protected].
The key feature of the Galaxy Backbone email service is the fact that it can be accessed from anywhere in the world and on mobile devices.
Though Hotmail, Rediff, Sify, Gmail, Yahoomail and similar types of widely-used email accounts are popular and easy to set up, they do not confer identity on user.
And despite their popularity, such e-mail accounts present their users with a number of inconveniences; inconveniences that can be avoided with ng. domain touted to posses robust, versatile and richly featured personalized details.
Nigeria CommunicationsWeek gathered that beyond creating identities for the various ministries, government wants to avoid the dangers of using free email accounts.
For instance, because users of hotmail and yahoomail accounts, so called free email share their Internet domains with millions of other users across the Web, they run the risk of having people eavesdropping on them.
A permanent secretary   for instance sending sensitive documents like military proposals and vouchers through free email accounts, they run the risk of exposing intra and inter-ministerial transactions, which may be a clear breach of national security.