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Comment by jorams | Hacker News Reader

I'm still reading the article, but this stood out to me:

> More than 300bn emails are said to be sent every day and if only one-third originate on Gmail—a conservative estimate—then a stack of print-outs would be 10,000km high.

I don't think that's a conservative estimate at all. In fact, I'd say it's a massive over-estimation.

Only one type of email is dominated by Gmail: personal email. I don't know about everyone, but I don't see many personal emails being sent.

Lots of those emails are for work, and there Gmail is not dominant at all. It's not insignificant, but Microsoft is a significantly larger part of the pile.

Another very large part of the total is automated emails, which are not sent through Gmail either.

Since Google Cloud doesn't include an email service, I'd go so far as to guess that more email originates from Amazon (SES) than from Google.

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https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/email-hosting--23

Seems like 1/3rd is more or less right. I think you're underestimating how big enterprise buy-in for the G-Suite is, Docs and Sheets are both widely used at this point.

Very interesting! Looks like my perspective is very Western Europe-centric, where the data matches what I expected. Gmail is bigger than I expected in the US, and also in Eastern Europe.

I do wonder what "market share" means here, and how the domains are selected. The massive market share of GoDaddy seems off, especially since from their website they seem to be reselling Microsoft Office 365, but could be explained by default email MX records on domains registered there (do they do that?).

FWIW, I've worked at two companies in my career so far, both could be described as tech unicorns turned public in the last decade, and both used G-Suite for all enterprise use-cases where applicable. Absolutely no adoption of MSFT products. That being said it also means I'm somewhat in the SV company bubble and I'm not sure how this picture looks throughout the industry.

Same. But I got a glimpse when I spent some time working at an established east coast company how much Microsoft is used for absolutely everything. I hadn't even heard of SharePoint but it is a whole massive universe unto itself.

Microsoft is huge for legacy companies. It integrates really well now with Office and while it was worse a few years back, it definitely seems to have improved now.

London based here, my company is on G suit as well.

Among my cohort (20s-30s), I'd say it's 99% gmail. Is there something equally hegemonic for West Europe? A lot of my german friends use GMX but I don't see as much from other countries.

For personal email of people in The Netherlands that I know it's a mix of Gmail, hotmail.com (so Outlook.com, but old accounts) and ISP-provided email. Older people being disproportionately more likely to use their ISP, and younger people being more likely to use Gmail. The Hotmail accounts all seem to be from the time that MSN Messenger was incredibly popular, forming essentially the first social network. Those people are in their mid-20s. I'm not sure about the overall distribution.

Why would Gmail's market share correlate with the number of emails sent? 99% of the 300bn sent daily will originate from bulk senders. Thats not Gmail.

I was responding to the part of OP's comment that alleges that Gmail is only big for personal email, and there's not a lot of that being sent. Gmail is clearly massive for enterprise email. I'm also not sure why this wouldn't correspond to market share in number of emails sent. All of those enterprises using Gmail are sending tons of emails internally.

I can't actually argue numbers with you, but an awful lot of owner-operated small businesses use Gmail. (And Yahoo email, for that matter!)

> Only one type of email is dominated by Gmail: personal email

Don't forget that GoogleApps/Gmail (and google classroom) is also rather popular in education.

I do wonder how many emails they receive though...

>> More than 300bn emails are said to be sent every day and if only one-third originate on Gmail—a conservative estimate—then a stack of print-outs would be 10,000km high.

Given: thickness of paper 0.0039 inches Lets say each email is at least a page

0.0039 inches * 300*10^9 pages to km = 29,718 (km)

Maybe if some emails are more than a page its not too far off.

But do 300*10^9 emails really get sent through gmail every day or is that in general?

Sorry lots of folks use their own domain name with google, gmail.com is just some of the email.

I assume everybody would understand that the overall numbers are a combination of gmail.com and GSuite.

Anecdotally, I just glanced at my inbox and found that I received no emails from individuals within my 20 most recent emails.

I can’t remember the last time I got a personal email outside of work.

I doubt I've broken triple digits on how many personal e-mails I've sent/received, and that's on a beta-era account.

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