Who hosts mail for more domains: Microsoft or Google?
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Time to slice and dice my favorite dataset: the top ten million domains list. This thing provides me with endless fun and joy. Tracking something over time provides unique insight into growth of mail provider reach, authentication protocol reach, insight into which providers are biggest or most represented in the upper echelon of bigger companies (or at least, domains with bigger traffic), and so much more.
This time around, it's a really simple slice and dice. Here I'm looking at the top ten million domains, counting which domains are MX'd to Google (*.google.com) and which domains are MX'd to Microsoft (*.outlook.com).
As always, there are caveats.
Some companies have a Secure Email Gateway (think Proofpoint or Mimecast) in front of their end user mailboxes. Even if those end user mailboxes are hosted by Microsoft or Google, I'm not going to include them here, as their MX records don't point to Microsoft or Google.
A handful of domains have MX records pointing to microsoft.com (113), gmail.com (49), mx.microsoft (70) or hotmail.com (2364). I am not including those in the numbers above. Should I? Perhaps eventually, but they're mostly not significant today. (And that Hotmail MX is old. I don't know what's up with that one! At least the microsoft.com ones seem to be mostly Microsoft properties and not clients.)
I thought it would be fun to try to measure this same reach via SPF records, instead of MX records. In fact, I ran the data that way initially. The results surprised me! I actually got wildly different numbers that vastly favored Microsoft by almost two-to-one. So many Google-served mail domains don't seem to have a top-level SPF record with an include referencing google.com. Is that because of DMARC provider macros for automatic SPF record management? Or is it due to some other reason? That might be something to dig into deeper the future.
And now, what about the actual growth? In 2023, Google was slightly ahead, but things seem to have evened out since then. As of August, 2024, in the top ten million domains, Google seems to show up in just under 5300 more domains compared to Microsoft. This doesn't tell us how many smaller domains (not in the top ten million) have their mail hosted by Google and Microsoft. But at this "top" segment – big as it is – Google and Microsoft are nearly neck in neck.
I hope you've enjoyed this data snapshot! How else should I be slicing and dicing this data? Be sure to let me know your thoughts.
Here's the data, for those who can't parse the image above:
Sep 2023: Microsoft 664660 domains, Google 730260 domains.
Oct 2023: Microsoft 725029 domains, Google 801825 domains.
Nov 2023: Microsoft 727458 domains, Google 799484 domains.
Dec 2023: Microsoft 729844 domains, Google 797543 domains.
Jan 2024: Microsoft 830559 domains, Google 867624 domains.
Feb 2024: Microsoft 835457 domains, Google 865808 domains.
Mar 2024: Microsoft 792765 domains, Google 805888 domains.
Apr 2024: Microsoft 810551 domains, Google 839902 domains.
May 2024: Microsoft 813440 domains, Google 836016 domains.
Jun 2024: Microsoft 816292 domains, Google 831495 domains.
Jul 2024: Microsoft 819012 domains, Google 828479 domains.
Aug 2024: Microsoft 821826 domains, Google 827073 domains.
Time to slice and dice my favorite dataset: the top ten million domains list. This thing provides me with endless fun and joy. Tracking something over time provides unique insight into growth of mail provider reach, authentication protocol reach, insight into which providers are biggest or most represented in the upper echelon of bigger companies (or at least, domains with bigger traffic), and so much more.
This time around, it's a really simple slice and dice. Here I'm looking at the top ten million domains, counting which domains are MX'd to Google (*.google.com) and which domains are MX'd to Microsoft (*.outlook.com).
As always, there are caveats.
Some companies have a Secure Email Gateway (think Proofpoint or Mimecast) in front of their end user mailboxes. Even if those end user mailboxes are hosted by Microsoft or Google, I'm not going to include them here, as their MX records don't point to Microsoft or Google.
A handful of domains have MX records pointing to microsoft.com (113), gmail.com (49), mx.microsoft (70) or hotmail.com (2364). I am not including those in the numbers above. Should I? Perhaps eventually, but they're mostly not significant today. (And that Hotmail MX is old. I don't know what's up with that one! At least the microsoft.com ones seem to be mostly Microsoft properties and not clients.)
I thought it would be fun to try to measure this same reach via SPF records, instead of MX records. In fact, I ran the data that way initially. The results surprised me! I actually got wildly different numbers that vastly favored Microsoft by almost two-to-one. So many Google-served mail domains don't seem to have a top-level SPF record with an include referencing google.com. Is that because of DMARC provider macros for automatic SPF record management? Or is it due to some other reason? That might be something to dig into deeper the future.
And now, what about the actual growth? In 2023, Google was slightly ahead, but things seem to have evened out since then. As of August, 2024, in the top ten million domains, Google seems to show up in just under 5300 more domains compared to Microsoft. This doesn't tell us how many smaller domains (not in the top ten million) have their mail hosted by Google and Microsoft. But at this "top" segment – big as it is – Google and Microsoft are nearly neck in neck.
I hope you've enjoyed this data snapshot! How else should I be slicing and dicing this data? Be sure to let me know your thoughts.
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