Intelligence · State of Email 2026
The Forgotten Anchor: An Audit of European Mail Hosting
Product category saturation, infrastructure security, and new customer activation strategies.
ShareShift.io presents a deep dive into consumption patterns and latest trends in email and productivity. Insights are based on deep analysis of 56+ million domains spanning 19 European markets (like .de for Germany, .fr for France). Additional focus was given to new inventory with 14-day and 90-day activation milestones to uncover the latest developments.
Target
Euro Digital Ecosystem
Timeframe
Q2 2026
Author
Nadya Frost
Key Insights
Business customers rely on messaging apps or third-party freemail only. For operators and investors, this gap represents significant unmonetized potential.
of mailboxes are powered by SaaS engines (MSFT Office 365, Google Workspace). The rest - by local and regional native mail providers.
New mailboxes activated in a bundle immediately after a new registration. Making mail available is the first step toward activation and regular use.
Background
Why Email is Still Relevant?
Internal teams often view email as a stagnant product, overshadowed by modern collaboration tools. While cybersecurity and IT teams worry about incessant phishing and social engineering threats. Consequently, email hosting is frequently deprioritized in product roadmaps.
Yet, to an operational small business, an inbox is priceless. It contains years of historical designs, customer relationship data, and accounting receipts. Most businesses will never delete their old emails, making mail hosting the ultimate product anchor.
Multiple market analyses including Verisign’s 2026 Retention Drivers have confirmed a foundational truth: activating a mailbox on a domain causes first-year customer retention rates to spike. In an industry where introductory domain discounts distort real growth, service activation dictates long-term portfolio stability.
Part 1
The State of Mail Hosting
To analyze and provide actionable insights on how mail is being sold in Europe today, ShareShift conducted a comprehensive pan-European analysis.
Across the entire base of 56.3 million scanned domain names, 3/4 had a mailbox attached. The remaining 42.6 millions are running an active mail setup, whether paid-for or bundled for free.
The largest provider is IONOS powering 1 in 10 mailboxes across Europe. Together, the two global productivity solutions match that: 7.6% is by Office 365 and 3.7% by Google Workspace. And the top 5 list is completed by Strato, a sister brand to IONOS within the same parent group United Internet AG; and OVH Cloud, a French-born infrastructure player.
A large portion - 42% - of the market is marked as "unknown". In reality, these mailboxes are run on self-hosted servers, small ISPs, and corporate MX relays. Several large vendors, like Aruba.it, Italy’s #1 player, automatically configures its customers’ mailboxes this way.
- Unknown41.7%
- Other22.2%
- IONOS10.1%
- Microsoft7.6%
- Strato6.1%
- OVHcloud4.2%
- Google3.7%
- All-Inkl2.6%
- One.com1.8%
Part 2
New Customer Activation Strategies
Complementing the bird’s eye view of the European market with a readout of the latest trends, we analyzed a cohort of ~400,000 new domains from May 2026, and ~250,000 domains from February 2026. This way, we can establish whether email is added on day 1, and what happens in the first 90-days afterwards.
Our starting point was on Top 30 European providers that serve the largest number of newly created domain names. For each, we mapped attach rates of “own mail” (using the provider’s own server infrastructure) and of “3rd party mail” (productivity suites, free cPanel or self-hosted mail).
Migrations and M&A are accounted for. E.g., Websupport’s “own mail” share includes recently migrated Active24 domains.
Strategic Insight
High attach rates of “3rd party mail” at Aruba.it, Home.pl, O2Switch, SEOHost and TransIP.nl are due to “self-hosted” or “unknown” mail servers, not due to high product sales.
ShareShift's telemetry revealed a deeply fragmented landscape. We’ve classified new domain infrastructure into distinct market behaviors which can serve as benchmarks for other operators:
The Bundle
Providers like All-Inkl.com (97% own-brand mail attach) and IONOS (94%) use defaults to capture maximum real estate immediately. They lock out external discovery on Day 1.
The Up-Sell
Providers like NameCheap Inc. (53% own-brand MX attach) and Hostinger (40%) run highly structured, clean technical operations. They on post-purchase friction to upsell more mail later.
The Reseller
GoDaddy shows only 2% native mail footprint but aggressively cross-sells Microsoft 365. It reaches paid x-sell attach of 15%, with a higher revenue per subscriber (ARPS) than basic native webmail.
The Marketer
Ecosystems like Wix and Squarespace do not host mail natively. Yet, 26% to 31% of their customers have active email anyway. We explain this by the “email marketing” proposition that these solutions offer.
(A) Narrow Activation Window
When a customer registers a new domain name, their motivation to establish a professional digital presence is at its absolute peak. However, this initial burst of engagement is fleeting. If a customer does not configure an inbox within the first week of buying a domain, they almost never do.
Operators must capitalize on this temporary window of high intent before the user's attention shifts elsewhere.
Strategic Insight
Crucially, email activation is highly time-sensitive; the window for adoption closes rapidly. Comparing email attach rates at day 7 and Day 90 of a domain lifecycle shows an incremental gain of only 2% on average.
(B) The Power of (Regional) Defaults
While the average activation rate of email is 76% across Europe, strong variances exist across individual markets.
In Italy, Germany and France, the attach rate of mail climbed into the 80% band, while in UK and Scandinavian countries, up to ⅓ of the domain base has no active mail at all. GoDaddy (#1 in .uk) does not bundle email at registration, and email activation is measurably lower - at market level.
Strategic Insight
The variances are, to a large extent, explained by system-level defaults, not unique customer preferences. In fact, the share of domains with active email is directly tied to whether the dominant local incumbent forces a bundling framework.
Part 3
Mail Infrastructure Security
To understand the robustness of European mail infrastructure, we analyzed SPF (Sender Policy Framework) records set to improve mail deliverability and to reduce spoofing risks. These records are part of the DNS infrastructure, and largely in the hoster's control.
We evaluated hosting operators against known best practices in creating and maintaining these records for customers, and identified which ones were problematic.
Analysis shows that many vendors adopt a “secure by default” stance (All-Inkl, O2Switch, WebSupport and others), creating mailboxes with correctly setup SPF records automatically on new domain intake. And that the gap in coverage is explained by several large European players (incl. Strato and Aruba.it) making a choice not to automatically configure SPF records for its customers.
Lack of maintenance of SPF records can materially weaken domain security and hurt inbox delivery. In some cases, errors are endemic: 7% of .es and 5% of .cz domains suffer from such issues.
Secure Mail?
Missing & Incorrect SPF Records
11 Million mailboxes unprotected. That's 1 in 4 mailboxes with no SPF record, even when the remedy is trivial for the hoster.
400,000 mailboxes are misconfigured, largely due to provider-level errors.
Strato's cautionary tale
While Strato achieves a stellar 94% own mail attachment rate on new domains, their SPF configuration rate sits at a catastrophic 6%. By failing to inject basic authentication records at scale, Strato provisions ~580 unauthenticated, vulnerable email domains every day. As major global networks enforce strict delivery rules, these unauthenticated mailboxes suffer immediate delivery failures; their emails go straight to spam folders, creating a ticking support bomb.
PS: The topic of email security and delivery is much broader than setting SPF records. More advanced technologies exist to protect mail from phishing attacks, and dramatically improve deliverability. ShareShift will dive deeper into best-practices on cyber security within the realm of hosting in dedicated reports.
Summary
Email Adoption in Europe
When it comes to email, hosting operators in Europe are clearly pursuing distinct commercial strategies and infrastructure choices. The chart below maps their relative sizes to illustrate which providers are setting the norm in Europe, and which are clear outliers.
- GoDaddy
- IONOS
- OVH
- Hostinger
- Squarespace
- Strato
- NameCheap
- Aruba.it
- one.com
- Infomaniak
- TransIP
- Openprovider
- Wix
- Vimexx
- All-Inkl
- Loopia
- Fasthosts
- RackHost
- Websupport
- Hostpoint
- Register.it
- Home.pl
- Gandi
- Simply
- Mijndomein
- Domeneshop
- Hetzner
- Forpsi
- SEOHost
- O2Switch
| name | SPF Attach | Email Attach | Number of domains |
|---|---|---|---|
| GoDaddy | 25 | 83.9 | 35161 |
| IONOS | 99 | 96.5 | 33754 |
| OVH | 97 | 95.1 | 28334 |
| Hostinger | 45 | 90.6 | 24542 |
| Squarespace | 34 | 70.1 | 14790 |
| Strato | 98 | 6.2 | 13389 |
| NameCheap | 78 | 81.8 | 11324 |
| Aruba.it | 100 | 17.7 | 8488 |
| one.com | 43 | 76.4 | 8346 |
| Infomaniak | 62 | 62 | 8147 |
| TransIP | 69 | 89.7 | 7621 |
| Openprovider | 68 | 91.6 | 7518 |
| Wix | 35 | 90.1 | 6644 |
| Vimexx | 27 | 95.7 | 5707 |
| All-Inkl | 100 | 99.1 | 5608 |
| Loopia | 21 | 83.8 | 5099 |
| Fasthosts | 41 | 92.6 | 4934 |
| RackHost | 21 | 83.2 | 4905 |
| Websupport | 92 | 96.7 | 4868 |
| Hostpoint | 98 | 97 | 4725 |
| Register.it | 98 | 95.2 | 4609 |
| Home.pl | 45 | 77.9 | 4552 |
| Gandi | 94 | 94.2 | 4412 |
| Simply | 54 | 85 | 4287 |
| Mijndomein | 24 | 95.6 | 3917 |
| Domeneshop | 24 | 87 | 3837 |
| Hetzner | 77 | 90.4 | 3831 |
| Forpsi | 41 | 26.2 | 3267 |
| SEOHost | 55 | 82.6 | 3003 |
| O2Switch | 100 | 98.1 | 2791 |
Appendix
Methodology & scope.
Data Sourcing
Data is sourced via the ShareShift Scanner, a proprietary methodology that interprets publicly available technical signals from the web. The latest telemetry scans were delivered on June 4, 2026.
Scope
56.M domains across European ccTLDs. The Email Attach Matrix analyzes a cohort of 280k+ European domains created in May 2026. Providers are chosen based on total number of domains added to inventory.
Attribution Methodology
It is only possible to attribute a domain to a provider if the MX records point to their mail servers. ShareShift has mapped over 60% of mail servers detectable through DNS to known providers. Remaining unmapped servers are hosting >100 domains each.
Detectability Constraints
The matrix covers only detectable signals. The customer may be paying for additional unused services without a technical footprint on the public web. Or the customer may be unaware of automatically provisioned mail hosting that they did not sign up for.
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