A few weeks ago we mapped the world's nameserver providers across 40 million apex zones. The follow-up question wrote itself: where does the world's email actually go? MX records are the answer — the DNS layer that tells every sending mail server “here's where to deliver mail for this domain.”

We pulled the MX record for every apex zone in the DNSArchive database. After filtering out subdomains (which inherit MX from their parent zone) and CNAME-chain artifacts (where data pipelines mirror NS values into the MX field for non-mail subdomains), we ended up with 30,277,589 apex zones with real, working MX records. That's a lot of mail destinations.

Three findings stood out: Google and Microsoft together hold less of the email market than people assume, German hosting companies punch dramatically above their weight, and roughly 26% of all apex domains on the internet have no working email at all.

📬 The Top 20 Email Hosting Providers

Across 30.3 million apex zones with valid MX records, here are the top 20 providers by zone count. Each zone is counted once per provider regardless of how many MX hostnames it has at that provider.

🅖 Google + Microsoft Hold Less Than You Think

The conventional wisdom is that two companies effectively own business email at this point. The data says otherwise — at least at the domain-count level. Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 combined account for 21.6% of MX-having domains, with Google leading at 11.97% (4.5 million zones if you fold googlemail.com aliases into aspmx.l.google.com) and Microsoft at 9.60%.

Add GoDaddy's Microsoft 365 reseller (which appears under its own secureserver.net MX records) and Microsoft's effective share climbs past 14%. Even so, the combined Google+Microsoft+GoDaddy footprint sits around 26% of all MX-having domains. The other three-quarters of the email-hosting market is split across hundreds of regional registrars, hosting companies, and self-hosted setups.

The likely explanation: most email-receiving domains are small business sites that came bundled with hosting from a registrar or a regional hosting provider, not enterprise tenants on Workspace or M365. The Google/Microsoft duopoly is real for enterprise mailboxes (where most mailbox count lives), but at the domain level, the long tail dominates.

🇩🇪 Germany Runs an Outsized Share of Europe's Email

Three of the top 10 MX providers in our data are German hosting companies: 1&1 IONOS (3.57%), Strato (3.05%), and All-Inkl/kasserver.com (1.18%). Add the long tail of German hosters (your-server.de, udag.de, schlund.de, netcup.net, your-server.de, t-online.de) and German-domiciled mail hosting accounts for over 8% of all MX-having domains globally.

Compare this to the NS analysis from a few weeks ago: 1&1 IONOS placed third for nameservers but Strato was sixth and German hosters dominated mid-rankings. The pattern is consistent. Germany's web-hosting industry is uniquely fragmented and locally focused — and it shows up clearly in any infrastructure dataset that counts domains rather than traffic.

📭 26% of the Internet Has No Working Email

Recall from the State of DNS 2026 that there are 40,935,013 apex zones with valid NS records. But only 30,277,589 of those have any MX record we could process. That's 10.6 million zones — roughly 26% of all live apex domains — with no working email destination at all.

Some of this overlaps with the ~8% of zones we found are parked or for sale: parked domains often have no MX, or their MX points back at the parking provider's catch-all (which is why h-email.net, the ParkingCrew mail catch-all, ranks 8th in our table at 1.19%). Other contributors: dev/staging domains, redirect-only domains, single-page apps without mail setup, and increasing numbers of domains using RFC 7505 null MX to explicitly opt out of receiving mail.

Whatever the mix, the headline is striking: a quarter of the registrable internet doesn't accept email. For a protocol that's existed since 1982, that's a meaningful structural shift.

📈 The Cloudflare Wedge

Cloudflare Email Routing (*.mx.cloudflare.net) shows up at #16 with 173,337 zones — only 0.57% of the market, but the product launched in 2022 and is the default email-forwarding option for anyone using Cloudflare's free DNS. Given the trajectory we observed for Cloudflare's nameserver share, it's plausible that Email Routing follows a similar growth curve and cracks the top 10 by 2027 or 2028. Worth watching.

On the privacy-focused end, Proton Mail, Tutanota, and Fastmail together account for roughly 0.35% of MX-having domains — a small but visible slice that has grown noticeably in our data over the past year.

📐 Methodology

Snapshot date: May 8, 2026. We started from 56,638,208 records in the DNSArchive database whose djson contained an "mx:" field. From those, we filtered out: 11,463,103 subdomain entries (which inherit MX from their parent zone); 11,498,209 rows where the MX value was identical to the NS value (a CNAME-chain artifact, not a real MX); and 2,807,545 rows where MX was missing entirely after parsing. Apex extraction used the Mozilla Public Suffix List. The remaining 30,277,589 apex zones each had at least one valid MX hostname.

For each zone, we extracted the registrable apex of every MX hostname (e.g., aspmx2.googlemail.com becomes googlemail.com, which we then map to Google Workspace). Provider grouping merges multiple SLDs into a single brand: Microsoft 365 absorbs *.protection.outlook.com, *.olc.protection.outlook.com, and outlook.com; Google Workspace absorbs *.l.google.com and googlemail.com; 1&1 IONOS absorbs ionos.de, kundenserver.de, 1and1.com, and related variants. Each zone counts once per provider regardless of how many MX records it has at that provider.

🔎 Verify It Yourself

Every number in this report can be reproduced against the live DNSArchive database. Use the free search interface to look up MX records for any domain, or grab an API key to run aggregate queries at scale.

🧭 Related Reading

• State of DNS 2026: Who Runs the Nameservers Across 40 Million Zones
• What Is Passive DNS? — how this data is collected.
• How to Look Up Historical DNS Records for Any Domain
• How DNS Changes Can Reveal Malicious Infrastructure

We'll re-run this analysis annually alongside State of DNS. The May 2027 edition will include year-over-year movement on the Google/Microsoft duopoly question, Cloudflare's growth trajectory, and whether the “26% with no email” number creeps higher or lower.