Consolidation of Email Platforms Bad for Email?

Tue Sep 8 11:38:01 UTC 2020

I'm sure Dave Crocker has thoughts about this, but it has come up
elsewhere.  There are both positives and negatives about having such a
consolidation.  The positive is that it a small club can establish
ground rules for how they will handle various forms of attacks,
including BGP hijacking, DKIM, SPF, and other forms of validation to
identify fraudulent mail, etc.  Also, if you have a whole lot of
postfixes and sendmails running around, that's a whole lot of code to
patch when things go wrong.  A small number of MSPs can devote a lot of
time and paid eyes on code.  They can also very quickly spot new attack
trends.

On the other hand, that means that it becomes difficult to become a new
entrant, because one doesn't easily get one's mail accepted.  Lots of
grey/blacklisting (forgive the use of the term).  Also, when one of
those systems fails, it takes down a vast number of customers. 
Furthermore, it represents a *massive* concentration of private
information that can be monetized.

Eliot

On 08.09.20 00:27, Mike Hammett via NANOG wrote:
> I originally asked on mailops, but here is a much wider net and I
> suspect there's a lot of overlap in interest.
>
>
> I had read an article one time, somewhere about the ongoing
> consolidation of e-mail into a handful of providers was bad for the
> Internet as a whole. It was some time ago and thus, the details have
> escaped me, so I was looking to refresh my recollection.
>
> Have any of you read a similar article before? If so, can you link me
> to it?
>
>
>
> -----
> Mike Hammett
> Intelligent Computing Solutions
> http://www.ics-il.com
>
> Midwest-IX
> http://www.midwest-ix.com
>
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