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from the they-change-the-rules-so-that-we-cannot-play dept.
The number of large users hosting their own email servers has halved in the last decade, according to Artem Berezin, a researcher who works at business e-mail company Live Direct Marketing.
On the Internet Society blog, Berezin explained that DNS records reveal a lot about email.
"The MX record says where the mailbox lives. The SPF record says who may send on the domain's behalf. The DMARC record says what should happen when a message fails authentication," he wrote.
Berezin says he analyzes those records using daily forward-DNS snapshots captured by the OpenINTEL project run by the University of Twente, SURFnet and SIDN Labs. He also consults the Tranco project's assessment of the most popular domains to determine the million most popular domains, then "classifies each domain's MX hostname and SPF includes against open dictionaries of mailbox providers, sending platforms and SaaS applications." The data he uses goes back to 2016, but he admits the dictionaries he accesses don't offer a complete view of the world's email servers.
His lead finding is that in 2016, 44.6 percent of the top million domains ran their own mail server. In 2026, that's down to 22.4 percent. The number of self-hosted mail servers is falling fast – down by half a percent in 30 days.
Self-hosting an email server remains the most common way to process mail, however Google Workspace is hot on its heels with 21.8 percent of detectable MX records, ahead of Microsoft 365's 16.8 percent.
Berezin thinks the fact that two tech giants handle 38.6 percent of email is concerning.
"The RIPE [NCC] community has spent years discussing DNS and CDN centralization; email is following the same path, just more quietly," he wrote. "When more than a third of popular domains depend on two providers to receive mail, an outage, a filtering change, or a policy decision at either one propagates through the whole ecosystem at once. And unlike a CDN, email has no graceful fallback – a rejected message is simply gone.
"There is a second-order effect, too. The fewer independent operators there are, the more the remaining ones inherit the deliverability problems of a world tuned for the big two. Anyone who has tried to stand up a fresh Postfix box in 2026 and get its mail accepted at scale knows exactly what I mean."
Postfix is a FOSS mail server. Berezin's reference to the struggle to get mail accepted at scale reflects the fact that Google and Microsoft operate filters to detect messages they believe come from untrustworthy sources. If those two tech giants don't accept messages from Postfix or other sources, they make their own services more attractive - marketers who want their email blasts to land will move to the service providers most likely to let their messages through.
Another thing that worries Berezin is the use of DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) records – the instruction in DNS settings that tells email servers how to handle emails that fail an authenticity check. His research found that over half of DMARC records have no valid policy or monitor email without enforcing policies.
That low rate is happening despite Google and Yahoo changing their bulk sender requirements in 2024 to require use of DMARC.
"At what concentration does inbound mail become a systemic dependency worth the community's explicit attention?" Berezin asks. "What would actually move DMARC from published to enforced, given that the 2024 mandates demonstrably did not do so? And how much of the Internet's mail infrastructure are we all failing to see because our dictionaries don't know its name?"
Berezin wrote that he can't answer those questions but hopes his daily download of email server data and ongoing analysis means he can one day.
(Score: 3, Disagree) by bart9h on Saturday August 29, @02:58AM (4 children)
Emails usage itself is in steep decline.
Nobody communicate with email anymore. Its only remaining functions are all bureaucracy related.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 29, @03:29AM (1 child)
> Nobody communicate with email anymore.
What??!! Before email, my friends and I exchanged letters by post. Now we do the same (at slightly higher frequency & lower cost) by email. Never slid into the "social media" trap of using a corporate intermediary to keep in touch.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday August 31, @02:24PM
I come from an era where the written letter was still a thing. I was encouraged to do so when applying for jobs, etc. I never got a single reply. No one has time for long-form letter writing. It is a dying art and the new generations are pushing on without it. I hope that literacy won't die along with it. The kids these days make the short form and in-joke slang of my generation look down right reasonable.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday August 30, @03:20AM (1 child)
I run about 50/50 at work (though I'm a self-avowed Luddite - never used Slack or similar work-social systems).
My 50/50 is split between e-mail and "Microsoft Teams" - mostly because Teams is our screen share / audio-video conferencing solution, and some colleagues over-use the Teams chat to send things that probably should be an e-mail instead. In-fact, were I king of the world, Teams would integrate with e-mail better so that much of what happens in Teams chat would be handled via e-mail channels instead.
Corporate long ago nerfed e-mail history storage, deleting everything not opt-in locally archived after 2 years. My personal gmail account is shadow-blocked, no reject message it just doesn't go through to my work e-mail. E-mail protocols could be extended / streamlined / run in parallel with more interactive-chat like functionality while still keeping the history unified with the rest of e-mail, but nobody wants to do that, they all want to make "the next big thing" which, at my last count, is a trail of dozens of neglected and defunct "next big things" that had their year or five in the sun and subsequently dwindled to sub-e-mail levels of adoption.
e-mail is the one thing that "everybody has" - not some proprietary farcebuch message minder, not some tweet-of-the-twat, WhatsApp is still pretty big - probably feels universal to the people who use it, but: do you use WhatsApp? I bet over 90% of WhatsApp users also have an e-mail account they know how to use too.
As to TFA, yeah, I gave up fighting that battle about 15 years ago, haven't checked my own SMTP/POP based e-mail account since maybe 2011, and didn't really use it years before that. The web based versions of e-mail have taken over, and more's the pity - e-mail really should retain its simple roots, and finally start wearing the PGP coat that was made for it 25+ years ago.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30, @05:55AM
I think the only emails I receive on my personal addresses, which are from personal acquaintances (as opposed to businesses) are when such acquaintance send me a link or a document from their computer and they expect me to further process it.
In every other occasion, people just send me messages on Whatsapp or Signal.
Isn’t there a name for that process of "casualisation" of communication? Letters -> emails -> SMS / text messaging apps -> vocal messages on messaging apps -> ?
My regret is that new encryption protocols like Signal, which don’t require any technical knowledge to set up, never were backported to email clients.