Question

Discuss who owns electronic mail systems, and why they do

Answer 1

As per the prevailing laws, technically, the email address is the property of the owner of the domain name to which it is being directed for example any domain which is being used in the email of any user. This could be the employer, or internet service provider or a free web-based email service . Philosophically, it is not easy to make a claim in the private property right.

Despite the above ruling, most of us believe that email belongs to them. In their opinion, there is some kind of control on the usage of email which can be imposed by them and thus they should be protected from spam, abuse similar to the physical mail but here is the exception that the user of email agrees to be the part of a network and use the internet. The owner of this network is the domain name provider.