Re:A cartoon intro to DNS over HTTPS (2018)
by belorn on Sunday October 20, 2019 @02:02PM
(#21305811)
Gmail is when I look around for market statitics around 30-40%. Second largest is Microsoft. Third Yahoo at something blow 15% with "other" trailing a few % below that. In the corporate space Microsoft is largest with office 365. G suit is common, but as I read it about half the market share of Office.
So no, not a rounding error and gmail is definitive not Email nor even 50% of it. Discussing market share also seems to me as very much the wrong question. Why should we not use the same process that email did when the world converted over to using encrypted email between client->MTA->Recipient? Is there a technical argument why converting things to HTTPS and then giving everything to whomever the browsers is partnered with is a better model?
Yes, they don't use a simple trusted list, but some secret Algorithm. The effect is the same (or maybe it's worse, since if the Algorithm doesn't like you, there's no one to ask to add you to the list).
The security improvements you mention were more or less pushed onto others by Google and everybody was forced to implement them since if you can't talk to GMail you might as well as not exist in the SMTP world.
> No company got more users or data when email protocols got encrypted
This is speculation, but it's easy to see how these changes could have benefited big players: they already have the data. By forcing encryption on everyone they deny this information to others (like ISPs who might sniff the traffic).
Also these security improvements increase the burden of maintenance of small mail servers, which again pushes more users towards big players.
I'm not saying encrypting SMTP traffic didn't benefit the users, but reasons for forcing it on everyone might not have been completely altruistic.