For $ome rea$on, the telco and cable ISPs moved their email over to Yahoo many years ago. Ultimately, about a third of all email users are using Yahoo’s email infrastructure. Then google came along and said, “You can have a free webmail account with one whole gigabyte of storage for free, trust us”, Google ended up with another third of email users. Finally, Microsoft through hotmail, outlook.com, and whatever they are calling Office365 this week, the final third of all email users are using Microsoft. Now, there are plenty of independent mail systems out there, but it’s increasingly rare as each day goes by.
So, what happens when Yahoo decides to block a large chunk of the IPs used by one of the internet’s other two email providers? If the three major players in email are unable to resolve such issues in a matter of minutes, what hope do the few remaining independent email providers have in dealing with the big three?