According to Live Direct Marketing research, the number of large domains hosting their own mail servers has dropped by half over the past decade, from 44.6% in 2016 to 22.4% in 2026. Analysis of DNS records shows that infrastructure is quickly falling under the control of the tech giants: Google Workspace (21.8%), followed by Microsoft 365 (16.8%), followed by home-made servers.
This centralization poses serious risks: Failure or changes in filtering by two monopolies could paralyze communications on a global scale, and it is increasingly difficult for independent administrators to achieve email delivery due to strict filtering algorithms.
Additionally, the study revealed a problem with the DMARC protocol – more than half of the domains use it solely for monitoring without actually applying strict blocking policies, even ignoring Google and Yahoo’s requirements last year.
