e-mail service

Who invented email?

Email has many fathers & mothers. Arguably the telegraph was a form of email. Certainly teletypes qualify. Pretty much as soon as there were time sharing systems, there were tools for exchanging messages among users - which was first, who really knows. Ray Tomlinson has the credit for the first ARPANET email between computers (and coining use of the “@” sign, in late 1971). From there, lots of people went to work standardizing & implementing the protocols we now view as email.

One thing for certain, it’s NOT, repeat NOT, Shiva Ayyadurai - despite his repeated attempts to seize credit.

Does Amazon use an e-mail service provider ?

Internally I'm pretty sure Amazon still uses Exchange and Outlook, but I suspect that was not your question.

Not super familiar with this, but for outgoing customer emails, last I knew there was a whole team that managed SMTP servers, spam reputation, etc, and a separate team that managed SES (Simple Email Service) - keep in mind Amazon was sending emails to customers even before SES was around. Justin Crites was heading the SES team when I was there and he is Really Good.

Can the e mail service providers like gmail, yahoo, hotmail etc read our e mails?

It's Normally, yes. E-mails by default are exchanged in cleartext. This means that anyone peeking at the data (in transit or as stored on a server) can read the contents in full. Some providers enjoy this chance – for example, GMail takes advantage of this in order to serve you personalized ads.

If both you and your correspondents enable the S/MIME protocol then strong crypto is employed and interception becomes a mathematical impossibility. It's perhaps worth noting that Google has always made S/MIME usage hard. The email software they give out as part of the Android operating system is the only one which does not support S/MIME.

Which e-mail services use IMAP?

Most all the major ones do, though you'll have to look around for some of them actually get the settings. If you're trying to install it on cellular device just going to do it, if you're trying to use a mail program such as Apple Mail or Thunderbird you may have to look around a little bit on Google just search IMAP for whatever your email service and IMAP.

What e-mail service provides the most privacy for users ?

I believe that all of the free services sell your data.

Based on the information I have, reagan.com is one of the most trustworthy and privacy-minded email providers. They are a paid service, from $33 - 40/year (which is less than Yahoo, for instance, charges to remove ads, while still collecting and using your personal information).

Why do e-mail services still allow addresses to be spoofed ?

There is no “spoofing” going on at all.

What you are referring to is the SMTP protocol whereby the sender specifies the “from” email address. Various schemes have been come up with to add verification of this “from” address to SMTP and there are a few with some penetration. But no scheme is universally implemented so it is still possible to utilize SMTP as it was originally intended.

The “from” address was always intended to allow the sender to put in ANYTHING they wanted. This is because there are a lot of reasons why you might be sending email from domain A and your email address that everyone is familiar with is using domain B.

So this is by design. It isn’t “spoofing” when the SMTP protocol has no validation or verification of the from address. An email service that inserted a from address or required some specific value would be not conforming to the SMTP standard and be broken.

Which are the worst e-mail service providers ?

what do you mean by email service providers

and what are we comparing them against?

If it is about using their mailboxes, then perhaps the worse is the strictest out there that will prevent you from receiving an email even a legit one. Outlook, iCloud etc.

If you are talking about email service providers to send out emails then I will need to know what we are comparing them against.

Someone will say Mailchimp is the worse because it is not allowing you to send based on content that they believe might cause more complaints and bad behavior, then spammers will say it is Mailchimp.

What e-mail service allows you to hide your internal files ?

File attachments ain’t publicly accessible, the sender and the recipients will be able to access a copy of the file, sure during transit (specially if the mail goes to another mail server) the whole email may be readable for anyone.

If you need to secure your content use PGP to encrypt the mail and it’s attachments.

Why do modern e-mail services limit attachments to only 20-33 megabytes ?

the problem is that the limit of email has to be lower than both the sender and the receiver of the mail and usually the limit is 20, 33 or 50 mb

Email was never designed for transmission of large files, most email services had a limit of 2 or 10 MB before the size was extended to gigabytes with Gmail and the per-mail limit was never extended.

Some services support up to 500 MB mails, but that only works if both the sender and the receiver supports it

What is the best E-Mail service for a professional business ?

Before I start, I should mention that I work for an email marketing software provider (ESP) that specializes in professional business accounts. That said, I’m not going to recommend our software automatically, as much as I’d like to. The fact is—and don’t let anyone tell you different—your email marketing needs are unique to your company and the way you like to work. Some companies like to keep a tight rein over their metrics, while others prefer a “batch-and-blast” approach. If I were you, I’d write down the features that most important to you and your marketing needs, as well as the number of subscribers and the amount of email you plan to send out every month. Then visit a few ESPs to see how they rate in terms of features and cost. Be careful, though. Some ESPs will say they offer certain features, but a close examination will reveal that they charge extra for those features. Features that often cost extra include A/B splits, automated workflows, API use, and transactional mailings. Good luck!