What email provider are startups using?

This typewriter hasn’t been used in years and the ink still worked like a champ

How to determine the current popular email provider for startups? Pull their DNS MX records. Then make charts and graphs because those are fun.

I was considering switching a company email provider to G Suite (Google’s email for work accounts). Was this a good choice? We aren’t innovating in the email space so we don’t need to handle email ourselves. We just need a stable provider.

Several providers are out there these days. If a lot of places are choosing a single provider, that is good enough. I wondered what startups were using for their email providers. Y Combinator companies seem like a good gauge of new startups. To keep things current, let’s look at just the most recent batch of Y Combinator companies.

Short answer: Y Combinator Spring 2018 is very into G Suite.

There were 118 domains in the final list. Some Y Combinator companies were filtered out because YList had either no URL or listed an app store URL.

I created a python script (available on GitHub) to poll for each record with DNSPython. Used networkx to turn the mappings into a directed graph and write the graph as graphml. The graphml file was plotted with Cytoscape and summary data was charted with Google Sheets/Charts.

A domain’s provider is defined by a DNS MX (mail exchange) record. I pulled the MX records for each company and filtered the domain names down to top-level and domain name. Otherwise, the list gets longer since subdomains are used to more specifically classify mapping records.

Some domains didn’t have any MX records defined. Some had a lower priority record with all random characters.

Domains can have multiple MX records with a priority value. If these all had the same TLD and domain name, the parser collapsed these into one entry. If multiple providers were defined, for some reason, then we’ll see multiple records for a domain. A handful of companies have defined separate providers at different priority levels.

G Suite users tend to use two MX record domains: google.com and googlemail.com. Latest G Suite setup instructions only use a google.com record though. When showing a graph, I included both. When showing popularity by percentage, I omitted googlemail.com. No reason to count it twice in that case.

Green are company domains. Orange are the MX provider domains. The two larger wheels of nodes are for google.com and googlemail.com.

Graph of MX record mappings. Company domains in green and MX provider domains in orange.

Even with google.com and googlemail.com collapsed into one record, G Suite is still winning with over 92% of the companies. There’s some double counting if a domain has multiple providers.

MX usage as a pie chart because pie charts are fun

Overall, seems like Y Combinator is suggesting their portfolio companies use G Suite or else G Suite is really that good. We just might have to switch to G Suite.