Email marketshare

Historical media withheld pending provenance, rights, and privacy review: MMMlogo.One of my side projects is an application called MineMyMail.   The app is fairly basic and extracts email addresses from a user’s mailbox in order for them to create targeted lists of email contacts.   This is useful for a small businesses who want to keep in touch with their customers but don’t have a CRM system in place.

One of the side benefits of this tool is an enormous amount of data that I can analyze.   I ensure that I protect the privacy of my users’ contact data however I do store some interesting statistics purely for research purposes.   I recently took a look at that data because I was curious about webmail market share. MineMyMail has parsed and validated literally tens of millions of email addresses since the beginning of the year when we launched (January 2013).   I think it is safe to say I’ve got a representative sample of the internet as a whole given the volume of data.

If we isolate the domain of the address and count the number of unique addresses seen for each provider we can infer from that how many accounts are created at each service.   This doesn’t necessarily mean active usage but is a good indicator of adoption.

There is quite a long tail of data.  There are over two million domains represented.   The top 50 however are what we really care about.  

Gmail still maintains a commanding lead however Hotmail and Yahoo aren’t far behind.   Once you get past the top 3 there is quite a distance with everyone else.   The reality is that the vast majority of email is managed by 3 companies (Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo).