Big Tech Gains Stranglehold on Email Infrastructure

According to researcher Artem Berezin, the number of large users hosting their own email servers has halved in the last decade. In 2016, 44.6 percent of the top million domains ran their own mail server, but by 2026 that figure had dropped to 22.4 percent.

Berezin's analysis is based on daily forward-DNS snapshots and data from the Tranco project, which assesses the most popular domains. He found that Google Workspace now handles 21.8 percent of detectable MX records, followed closely by Microsoft 365 with 16.8 percent.

With these two tech giants controlling over a third of email, Berezin worries about their influence on the ecosystem. 'When more than a third of popular domains depend on two providers to receive mail, an outage or filtering change at either one propagates through the whole ecosystem at once,' he wrote.