Consolidation of Email Platforms Bad for Email?

Tue Sep 8 14:59:05 UTC 2020

Matt Harris|Infrastructure Lead Engineer
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On Tue, Sep 8, 2020 at 6:43 AM Eliot Lear via NANOG <nanog at nanog.org> wrote:

> 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.  [...]
> They can also very quickly spot new attack trends.
>
In theory, but the current state of what's coming out of sendgrid implies
otherwise. Once you get into that small club, it's just as hard to get
kicked out, and unfortunately that means that if abuse, UCE, etc is coming
from those hosts, they've got an even higher chance of hitting your inbox.
So while in theory it might work the way you're thinking, in practice it
hasn't because once you are in that club, a lot of the financial motivation
to prevent abuse of your service - that is, inbox deliverability for your
client base - goes away. That deliverability isn't likely to change for the
negative on any scale that you care about once you're "in". But to be "in"
you have to be at a huge scale. The small players are the ones who get
hurt, and spam still gets through just fine only now via different means.

Also oligopolies in general are bad for everyone except the owners thereof
and should be discouraged on principle.
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