New surveys on email server providers

Posted by Matthias Gelbmann on 29 October 2019 in News, Email Servers

When we analyze websites, we look where they direct emails sent to that domain. Sometimes, webmasters host their own email infrastructure, but that has become a laborious task in the last years, primarily due to various methods of fighting spam emails. More commonly nowadays is to rely on the email services of a professional provider. Web hosting providers often offer email services, but there are also plenty of companies specialized in email servers.

By far the most popular provider is Google with its Gmail offering, used by 16% of all websites. Please note that this figure doesn't include personal email accounts in the form of username@gmail.com. We only count email services offered for domains. For instance, if you own the domain example.com and you use Gmail to receive emails for username@example.com, then we count this as one domain using Gmail. If you want, this can be seen as measuring the business email market, not the personal email market.

This is just another market that is totally dominated by Google. Google is already leading our surveys on JavaScript content delivery networks, traffic analysis tools, advertising networks and tag managers. On top of that, Google also totally dominates the client-side of the web.

Second in the list of email server providers is Microsoft with 8.2% of the market, ahead of the most popular web hosting provider, the GoDaddy Group with 5.6%.

Google is even more dominant among high-traffic sites: an impressive 40.2% of the top 1000 websites use Gmail. It helps, of course, that Google itself runs quite a few of these top 1000 sites.

The provider with the highest share of high-traffic sites among their users is Mailfence, a Belgian provider of secure email services, just ahead in that particular survey of Proofpoint, which is also specialized in cybersecurity.

Although many web hosting providers also offer email services, there is only a weak correlation between hosting providers and email server providers. Amazon, for example, is the number 2 hosting provider, but only at rank 12 in the email provider statistics. Even sites hosted by Amazon prefer Gmail and Microsoft when it comes to email services, though Amazon is at least third in that market segment.

The usage of email providers varies greatly by country. Gmail dominates most of North and South America, as well as UK, India, Australia and most of Eastern Europe. Microsoft is the most popular provider in Scandinavia, Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Switzerland, Ireland, Portugal, South Africa and New Zealand. Yandex is strongest in Russia and adjacent countries such as Belarus and Kazakhstan, as well as Turkey. OVH is popular in France and a few African countries, United Internet in Germany, Poland and Spain, Aruba in Italy, Tencent in China, and Sakura in Japan.

Our new surveys already cover all the large email providers. We will add more of the smaller ones in the coming weeks and months.

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Please note, that all trends and figures mentioned in that article are valid at the time of writing. Our surveys are updated frequently, and these trends and figures are likely to change over time.

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