We recently analyzed all outgoing email traffic from the MailChimp servers to see who the major email providers are, and to identify trends (analyzing gobs of email data is what we do in our pastime here). So we though we’d share our findings:
Major email domain market share
Yahoo and Hotmail are tops, but Gmail is on an upward trend (related study: Gmail Users More Engaged?). AOL has some work to do, and Comcast is pretty flat.
BTW, if you like email marketing stats, or need data to print and show to your clueless boss, bookmark MailChimpCharts and EmailStatCenter.
[...] Major Email Provider Trends: Yahoo and Hotmail Tops, Gmail Catching – MailChimp [...]
did you count mail using google apps? or is it impossible?
Jonathan, we didn’t count google apps. Not sure if it’s not possible or just not feasible.
Hi Ben,
It should be fairly easy to determine whether email is coming from a Google Mail server or not, regardless of whether it’s from Google Apps or Gmail. If you check the SMTP headers of an email you’ve received, there is a “Received: ” header for every server that the message was passed to, with the origin header being last.
An email message from a non Google mail server would have a Received: header that looks like this (IPs changed):
Received: from 192.168.0.0 (HELO 192.168.0.0?) (72.229.21.106)
by mx.notagooglemailserver.com with SMTP; 14 Oct 2010 09:41:55 -0000
and an email message from a Google mail server (whether from gmail or Google Apps mail) would have a Received: header like the following:
Received: from [192.168.0.0] (mail.example.com [192.168.0.0])
by mx.google.com with ESMTPS id mz11sm6886869qcb.39.2010.10.14.02.47.46
(version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=RC4-MD5);
or is there something that I’m missing?
.02
Very interesting! I’m looking at building autocomplete functionality into the email field of my website’s signup form. Basically as the user types in their email, it would suggest different domains to complete their email address with. Obviously these domains would be ordered by popularity.
These top 5 would be a great start, but any chance you’d be willing to publish a more comprehensive list?
[...] Gmail вообще уже сколько лет малопопулярен, а толку? [...]
Hello, is there a current updated version for 2010 email trends? Thank you for this post. It is very interesting to see what people are using. I didn’t realize so many people still used hotmail.
Hi Kristin, we’ll try to run an update and post it soon. Most likely, we’ll post it here: http://blog.mailchimp.com/resources/charts so you might want to bookmark it.
[...] good chocolates every Christmas) asked me if we had an update to this old blog post from 2009: Major Email Provider Trends: Yahoo and Hotmail Tops, Gmail Catching. I like it when he sends me chocolate, so I thought we better provide an update:Back in 2009, Gmail [...]
The question I have is what do the numbers on the Y-axis mean? Its unlabeled.
I’m not entirely sure what it means on that particular graph, but I can give you something better. A recently updated blog post covering some of the same information with more graphs and nerdy numbers: http://eepurl.com/oG8On