A new Indian law requires that all web mail within the country come from the Indian ccTLD, .in. Government officials state that the Mumbai terror attacks and identity theft cases are the reason behind their push in the ccTLD changes. After the terror attacks, the Indian government faced difficulties in getting information from the terrorists’ Blackberries because information housed outside of the country is difficult to obtain.
The new law effects all free web mail providers, such as Google’s Gmail service and Microsoft’s Hotmail service. Because of the new law, any of these free web mail service that offers its services to Indian nationals must set up mail services locally in India and offer email addresses with the .in extension.