There are many ways you can answer this question. It could be based on functionality of the email suite or the number of users but for this post, we are going to look at MX records and identify the mailbox provider for over 265M domains.  

These domains represent more than 90% of global public domains.  The other 10% of domains are hidden or lack programmatic access to DNS data which is why they are not included.

As a side note, it is interesting to note that  60% of all domains  do not have an MX record.

The domain count will not correlate directly with the number of customers using a particular MBP because organisations usually have multiple domains for different locations, businesses or subsidiaries.  

However, the domain count is a good proxy when considering an MBP in the same competitive space.  For example, the numbers for Google Workspace vs Microsoft 365 do fit with other market share data for business productivity software.

The table below shows top 20 on a worldwide basis. This will change from country to country and this is something you can measure if you map Datazag's datbase onto your own data.

It is interesting to note that over half of the top 20 MBPs are hosting and domain management companies. This is because the hosting companies unsell  hosting, website and email services along with domain purchases. Hosting companies also market existingdomains which they sell at a premium.  These are kept as parked domains which are often monetised with genric keyword advertising pagesprovide context there are over 40 M parked domains are flagged in our database.  If these are showing up in your lists, it may be a cause for concern as they probably don’t have consent. There is also some evidence that they are used by spam trap networks so beware. Parked domains are an important topic from an email deliverability perspective and is covered in a separate blog post.

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Here is another league showing the MBP for the top 1 million domains in terms of traffic

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As you can see the list of MBPs is quite different.  Google and Microsoft still dominate but there aren ow a lot more recognized mailbox providers and email security companies

Again, over 50% of the top million domains do not have MX records. There are various reasons for this. Some domains are for cloud services or other popular IT services.  Others are brands that use services like Cloudflare which take care of email provision without obscuring the MX record on the customer domain.

We will looking at different stats in future posts and building up a general stats page which iwill be updated on a regular basis.

In summary, Datazag's data service enable you to gather much richer view of your lists both consumer webmail data and custom domains. It means you segement data for better deliverability and also identify any bad data in your lists.

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In summary, it is noticeable that the MBP market for business domains is dominated by Google and Microsoft but depending on your business or the countries you work in, your email lists are likely to have a different list. You can find out by using data services.