Mailbox provider

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A mailbox provider, mail service provider or, somewhat improperly, [1] email service provider is a provider of email hosting. It implements email servers to send, receive, accept, and store email for other organizations or end users, on their behalf.

Contents

The term "mail service provider" was coined in the Internet Mail Architecture document RFC   5598. [2]

Types

There are various kinds of email providers. There are paid and free ones, possibly sustained by advertising. Some allow anonymous users, whereby a single user can get multiple, apparently unrelated accounts. Some require full identification credentials; for example, a company may provide email accounts to full-time staff only. Often, companies, universities, organizations, groups, and individuals that manage their mail servers themselves adopt naming conventions that make it straightforward to identify who is the owner of a given email address. Besides control of the local names, insourcing may provide for data confidentiality, network traffic optimization, and fun.

Mailbox providers typically accomplish their task by implementing Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) and possibly providing access to messages through Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP), the Post Office Protocol, Webmail, or a proprietary protocol. [3] Parts of the task can still be outsourced, for example virus and spam filtering of incoming mail, or authentication of outgoing mail.

ISP-based email

Many mailbox providers are also access providers. [4] Not the core product, their email services could lack some interesting features, such as IMAP, Transport Layer Security, or SMTP Authentication —in fact, an ISP can do without the latter, as it can recognize its clients by the IP addresses it assigns them.

Free mail providers

Launched in the 1990s, AOL Mail, Hotmail, Lycos, Mail.com and Yahoo! Mail were among the early providers of free email accounts, joined by Gmail in 2004. They attract users because they are free and can advertise their service on every message.

According to American entrepreneur Steve Jurvetson, Hotmail grew from zero to 12 million users in 18 months. [5] In 1997, Microsoft purchased Hotmail for $400 million and relaunched it as MSN Hotmail the same year. [6] [7] This was relaunched as Outlook.com in 2012. [8] [9]

Premium email services

These are the paid equivalent of free mail providers. That is, a better alternative to ISP-based email. Much less popular than free mail, they target a niche of users.

Vanity email

It is also possible to run a shim service, providing no access but just forwarding all messages to another account, which does not lend itself to direct use, for example because it is temporary or just less appealing.

Role as identifier

A mailbox provider is the administrator of the registered domain name that forms the domain-part of its email addresses. As such, it controls the MX records that specify which hosts will receive email destined to those addresses. The operators of those hosts define the meaning of the local-part of an address by associating it to a mailbox, which in turn can be associated to a user. [10] The mailbox provider also specifies how users can read their mail, possibly creating SRV records to ease email client configuration, or giving detailed instructions.

Email addresses are convenient tokens for identifying people, even at web sites unrelated to email. In fact, they are unique, and allow password reminders to be sent at will.

From a bureaucracy-oriented point of view, there is no formal undertaking beyond domain name registration. This role is based on IETF standards, and, unlike X.400 and other ITU-T works, in and of itself requires no arrangements with local authorities. The notion of Administration Management Domain (ADMD) is derived afterwards, from empirical evidence. [2] However, local authorities concerned with Internet privacy issues may add rules and requisites on top of the original Internet email design.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Email</span> Mail sent using electronic means

Electronic mail is a method of transmitting and receiving messages using electronic devices. It was conceived in the late–20th century as the digital version of, or counterpart to, mail. Email is a ubiquitous and very widely used communication medium; in current use, an email address is often treated as a basic and necessary part of many processes in business, commerce, government, education, entertainment, and other spheres of daily life in most countries.

In computing, the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) is an Internet standard protocol used by email clients to retrieve email messages from a mail server over a TCP/IP connection. IMAP is defined by RFC 9051.

Within the Internet email system, a message transfer agent (MTA), or mail transfer agent, or mail relay is software that transfers electronic mail messages from one computer to another using the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. In some contexts the alternative names mail server, mail exchanger, and MX host can be used to describe an MTA.

In computing, the Post Office Protocol (POP) is an application-layer Internet standard protocol used by e-mail clients to retrieve e-mail from a mail server. Today, POP version 3 (POP3) is the most commonly used version. Together with IMAP, it is one of the most common protocols for email retrieval.

The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is an Internet standard communication protocol for electronic mail transmission. Mail servers and other message transfer agents use SMTP to send and receive mail messages. User-level email clients typically use SMTP only for sending messages to a mail server for relaying, and typically submit outgoing email to the mail server on port 587 or 465 per RFC 8314. For retrieving messages, IMAP is standard, but proprietary servers also often implement proprietary protocols, e.g., Exchange ActiveSync.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Email client</span> Computer program used to access and manage a users email

An email client, email reader or, more formally, message user agent (MUA) or mail user agent is a computer program used to access and manage a user's email.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Webmail</span> Email service that can be accessed using a web browser

Webmail is an email service that can be accessed using a standard web browser. It contrasts with email service accessible through a specialised email client software. Examples of webmail providers are AOL Mail, Proton Mail, Gmail, GMX Mail, Mailfence, Outlook.com/Hotmail.com, and Yahoo! Mail. Additionally, many internet service providers (ISP) provide webmail as part of their internet service package. Similarly, some web hosting providers also provide webmail as a part of their hosting package.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Internet service provider</span> Organization that provides access to the Internet

An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides services for accessing, using, managing, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, non-profit, or otherwise privately owned.

An email address identifies an email box to which messages are delivered. While early messaging systems used a variety of formats for addressing, today, email addresses follow a set of specific rules originally standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in the 1980s, and updated by RFC 5322 and 6854. The term email address in this article refers to just the addr-spec in Section 3.4 of RFC 5322. The RFC defines address more broadly as either a mailbox or group. A mailbox value can be either a name-addr, which contains a display-name and addr-spec, or the more common addr-spec alone.

Email authentication, or validation, is a collection of techniques aimed at providing verifiable information about the origin of email messages by validating the domain ownership of any message transfer agents (MTA) who participated in transferring and possibly modifying a message.

Sieve is a programming language that can be used for email filtering. It owes its creation to the CMU Cyrus Project, creators of Cyrus IMAP server.

Push email is an email system that provides an always-on capability, in which when new email arrives at the mail delivery agent (MDA), it is immediately, actively transferred (pushed) by the MDA to the mail user agent (MUA), also called the email client, so that the end-user can see incoming email immediately. This is in contrast with systems that check for new incoming mail every so often, on a schedule. Email clients include smartphones and, less strictly, IMAP personal computer mail applications.

Email forwarding generically refers to the operation of re-sending a previously delivered email to an email address to one or more different email addresses.

A mailbox is the destination to which electronic mail messages are delivered. It is the equivalent of a letter box in the postal system.

A bounce address is an email address to which bounce messages are delivered. There are many variants of the name, none of them used universally, including return path, reverse path, envelope from, envelope sender, MAIL FROM, 5321-FROM, return address, From_, Errors-to, etc. It is not uncommon for a single document to use several of these names.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Feedback loop (email)</span> Process of forwarding user complaints to senders

A feedback loop (FBL), sometimes called a complaint feedback loop, is an inter-organizational form of feedback by which a mailbox provider (MP) forwards the complaints originating from their users to the sender's organizations. MPs can receive users' complaints by placing report spam buttons on their webmail pages, or in their email client, or via help desks. The message sender's organization, often an email service provider, has to come to an agreement with each MP from which they want to collect users' complaints.

SMTP Authentication, often abbreviated SMTP AUTH, is an extension of the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) whereby a client may log in using any authentication mechanism supported by the server. It is mainly used by submission servers, where authentication is mandatory.

Spam reporting, more properly called abuse reporting, is the action of designating electronic messages as abusive for reporting to an authority so that they can be dealt with. Reported messages can be email messages, blog comments, or any kind of spam.

EmailTray is a lightweight email client for the Microsoft Windows operating system. EmailTray was developed by Internet Promotion Agency S.A., a software development d.

The JSON Meta Application Protocol (JMAP) is a set of related open Internet Standard protocols for handling email. JMAP is implemented using JSON APIs over HTTP and has been developed as an alternative to IMAP/SMTP and proprietary email APIs such as Gmail and Outlook. Additional protocols and data models being built on top of the core of JMAP for handling contacts and calendar synchronization are meant to be potential replacements for CardDAV and CalDAV, and other support is currently in the works.

References

  1. ↑ "M³AAWG Anti-Abuse Best Common Practices for Hosting and Cloud Service Providers" (PDF). M³AAWG. March 17, 2015. Email Service Provider – A company that offers services to send email at volume.
  2. 1 2 Dave Crocker (July 2009). "Administrative Actors". Internet Mail Architecture. IETF. sec. 2.3. doi: 10.17487/RFC5598 . RFC 5598 . Retrieved 18 April 2013.
  3. ↑ Murray Kucherawy, ed. (June 2012). Creation and Use of Email Feedback Reports: An Applicability Statement for the Abuse Reporting Format (ARF). IETF. doi: 10.17487/RFC6650 . RFC 6650 . Retrieved 28 June 2012. "Mailbox Provider" refers to an organization that accepts, stores, and offers access to [RFC5322] messages ("email messages") for end users. Such an organization has typically implemented SMTP [RFC5321] and might provide access to messages through IMAP [RFC3501], the Post Office Protocol (POP) [RFC1939], a proprietary interface designed for HTTP [RFC2616], or a proprietary protocol.
  4. ↑ J.D. Falk, ed. (November 2011). Complaint Feedback Loop Operational Recommendations. IETF. doi: 10.17487/RFC6449 . RFC 6449 . Retrieved 28 June 2012.
  5. ↑ Jurij Leskovec (2008), Dynamics of Large Networks, ProQuest, ISBN   9780549957959
  6. ↑ Law, David (July 18, 2016). "Outlook.com leaves preview as the world's fastest growing email service going from 0 to 60 million in just 6 months". Microsoft News. Microsoft . Retrieved February 19, 2013.
  7. ↑ Thurrott, Paul (July 31, 2012). "Outlook.com Mail: Microsoft Reimagines Webmail". Supersite for Windows. Penton Media. Archived from the original on August 3, 2012. Retrieved August 1, 2012.
  8. ↑ "Windows Live Hotmail Launches Worldwide in 36 Languages". IT News Online. May 7, 2007. Archived from the original on May 3, 2008. Retrieved October 26, 2010.
  9. ↑ Wilhelm, Alex (October 3, 2011). "Microsoft announces massive Hotmail update to better combat Gmail". The Next Web. Retrieved June 19, 2012.
  10. ↑ John Klensin (October 2008). Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. IETF. doi: 10.17487/RFC5321 . RFC 5321 . Retrieved 14 April 2013.
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