@manu @leah Not exactly, because mail is not federated like Mastodon is. When user A sends a mail from their provider PA to user B's provider PB, this can be seen as implying consent of the user that PA communicates with PB to transmit the data of the mail.

With the Fediverse, there is no single recipient - by default, *all* servers who want to can retrieve the public messages. I can make a new server PC and access all (future?) messages, even though A didn't know about PC at that time.