Who’s Got Your Mail?:Characterizing Mail Service Provider Usage

Abstract

E-mail has long been a critical component of daily communication and the core medium for modern business correspondence. While traditionally e-mail service was provisioned and implemented independently by each Internet-connected organization, increasingly this function has been outsourced to third-party services. As with many pieces of key communications infrastructure, such centralization can bring both economies of scale and shared failure risk. In this paper, we investigate this issue empirically --- providing a large-scale measurement and analysis of modern Internet e-mail service provisioning. We develop a reliable methodology to better map domains to mail service providers. We then use this approach to document the dominant and increasing role played by a handful of mail service providers and hosting companies over the past four years. Finally, we briefly explore the extent to which nationality (and hence legal jurisdiction) plays a role in such mail provisioning decisions