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Jan Schaumann

We can combine some of the domains by company or parent organization to find that Google takes the lion's share of domains with about 34%, GoDaddy around 14%, Namecheap 13.5%, and Microsoft trailing behind with about 4.7%

A pie chart showing Google (34%), GoDaddy (14%), Namecheap (13.5%), Microsoft (4.7%) and misc other domains
8 comments
Jan Schaumann replied to Jan

But all that is for _all_ gTLD domains, which includes millions of parked domains, typo-squatting and spam domains, etc.

What if we look at the Top 1M domains?

Let's pull the list from tranco-list.eu/...

Jan Schaumann replied to Jan

For those 1 million domains, we find around 433K distinct MX servers in 230K domains. The top 20 mail server domains there are:

01.	138 K	google.com.	Google
02.	94 K	outlook.com.	Microsoft
03.	59 K	googlemail.com.	Google2
04.	15.8 K	yandex.net.	Yandex LLC
05.	13 K	mimecast.com.	Mimecast Limited
06.	12.8 K	pphosted.com.	Proofpoint, Inc.
07.	9.5 K	qq.com.	Tencent QQ
08.	9.2 K	registrar-servers.com.	Namecheap
09.	8 K	secureserver.net.	GoDaddy Hosted Mail
10.	5.7 K	barracudanetworks.com.	Barracuda Networks
11.	5.5K K	zoho.com.	Zoho Corporation
12.	4.7 K	amazonaws.com.	Amazon Web Services, Inc.
13.	4.4 K	emailsrvr.com.	Rackspace Technology
14.	4.1 K	yandex.ru.	Yandex LLC
15.	3.7 K	iphmx.com.	Cisco IronPort Hosted MX
16.	3.5 K	mail.ru.	VK / Mail.ru Group
17.	3.5 K	ovh.net.	OVH / OVH Groupe SAS
18.	3.4 K	mailspamprotection.com.	SiteGround
19.	3 K	ppe-hosted.com.	Proofpoint, Inc.
20.	3 K	beget.com.	Beget LLC
Jan Schaumann replied to Jan

Google and Microsoft together handle over 60% of the Top 1M domains' mails!

Many other domains use service provides such as Proofpoint, Barracuda Networks, or Cisco / IronPort, but those may of course only sit in front of Google and Microsoft's mail servers as well.

A pie chart showing

Google: 41.1%
Microsoft: 19.6%
Yandex: 4.1%
Proofpoint: 3.3%
Mimecast: 2.7%
Tencent QQ: 2.0%
Namecheap: 1.9%
GoDaddy: 1.6%
Barracuda Networks: 1.2%
Zoho: 1.1%
Amazon AWS: 1.0%
Rackspace: 0.9%
Cisco IronPort Hosted MX: 0.8%
VK / Mail.ru Group: 0.7%
OVH: 0.7%
SiteGround: 0.7%
Beget LLC: 0.6%
Jan Schaumann replied to Jan

So all in all, the answer to the question of who can read your email pretty much boils down to -- yep -- "Google and Microsoft".

Even if your domain doesn't use one of their mail servers, chances are that whoever you are sending mail _to_ does.

Jan Schaumann replied to Jan

Now these companies are probably doing a much better job running and securing your mail than you would, and outsourcing often makes good sense.

But still, this is another example of increasing centralization: our businesses and personal online lives are concentrated in the hands of just a few companies.

Jan Schaumann replied to Jan

Alright, that's all for today. Gotta go and fix my postfix DMARC setup and block a bunch of spammers or something.

And if you don't like social media threads or want to share this outside of Mastodon, here's all of the above in a single blog post:

netmeister.org/blog/mx-diversi

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