Who really sends, receives and, most importantly perhaps, stores your business' email? Most likely Google and Microsoft, unless you live in China or Russia. And the market share for these two companies keeps growing.

That's the conclusion reached by a group of computer scientists at the University of California San Diego, who studied the email service providers used by hundreds of thousands of Internet domains—between 2017 and 2021.

"Our research team empirically showed the extent to which email has been outsourced and concentrated to a small number of providers and service providers," said Stefan Savage, a professor in the UC San Diego Department of Computer Science and Engineering and one of the paper's senior authors.

The team presented their findings at the Internet Measurement Conference 2021, which took place virtually Nov. 2 to 4, 2021.

This concentration has several consequences: it increases the impact of service failures and data breaches; and it exposes companies and users outside the United States to potential subpoenas from U.S. government agencies.

A quick explainer of the difference between domains and service providers: The second half of your email address is your company or agency's domain—for example, ucsd.edu is the domain for the University of California San Diego. The email service provider is the company that, behind the scenes, provides the infrastructure that allows you to send and receive email and stores your messages—so ucsd.edu's email service is provided by a combination of Google and Microsoft mail services.

https://techxplore.com/news/2021-12-mail-google-microsoft.html