@jwz Wow. the move from me.com to iCloud.com seems to have worked for Apple. I wonder what Mac.com is.

@jwz even better is when I use my custom domain on a website (which uses Tuta Mail) only to be told it’s not a valid email address, because I decided not to use fucking Gmail.

@jwz Yeah, I ran my own email server until defending against spammers became a full-time job… and google still had the “don’t be evil” motto when I moved to gmail. Sigh

@jwz And presumably a decent proportion of "everything else" has a Google or Microsoft MX record.

@jwz I still get a kick out of emailing my father-in-law at his ancient (but working!) netscape.net address.

@jwz and now my email chains are getting spammed with this. Great.

@jwz
It would be interesting to learn what percentage of all Mastodon accounts is on mastodon.social.
@dnalounge

@jwz @dnalounge I find Yahoo still very high

@jwz
Did you comb through your mail logs or how did you gather those statistics?
My logs don't live long enough, but maybe I could get something out of rspamd. 🤔
@dnalounge

I am rooting for the 5.8%!

@jwz GMail's global usage dropped from ~60% in 2022 to ~43% in 2024. And these days, most of the people I know are on smaller providers, if they don't run their own server.

Being able to use your own server or choose from thousands of providers, for something that is accepted and used almost universally on the entire Internet, is obviously still a massive success story. And the size of some of the providers doesn't change that.

@jwz @dnalounge AOL? Who knew my family were DNA Lounge fans?

@jwz @dnalounge When I see Gmail, I immediately think spam shop, since most of the addresses we block (over 90 per cent) are from there. It makes no sense to me that anyone would want to be on the same domain and be associated with spam. We wouldnʼt pay for services from anyone pitching from Gmail, either.
Not to mention the obvious privacy hole where other people can read your emails.

https://jackyan.com/blog/2024/04/when-the-earliest-gmail-accounts-receive-emails-destined-for-others/

@jwz @dnalounge People still use Yahoo!?

@jwz @dnalounge Well, everything else is still 5.8% and thus actually no.3 eh ;)

But yes, most people have chosen the 'free' (read: data gathering) mail thingy that the other people had and no.1 and no no.5 on that list definitely are causing a lot of issues: https://social.kernel.org/notice/B0uSDv8wUgtMe1WsCm and https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20251205150558.GW13487@kvack.org/T/#u amongst others evidence that.

Mastodon is doing a wee bit better, but not too much, with many folks on centralized instances, eg mastodon.social too.
Fortunately we still have options!

@jwz @dnalounge

Today in Email Hegemony.

Here are the 2025 top ten domains from orders placed on the @dnalounge store. Remember this the next time someone uses email as an example of a federation success story.
73.0% gmail.com

Never used gmail never will.

I do not even like to answer any mail coming from googles spyware domain

nah, for real, the email game is like a sad soggy pickle—no crunch, no excitement. it's time to shake things up, ya feel? the internet’s a whole ass buffet!

@jwz @dnalounge "hotmail" is a pain to relay to, they quickly block you. I would propose we shame them and then remove them.
What are your admin nightmares?

@jwz @dnalounge Not just that, also the heavy handed way we try to deal with spam and the bad time small servers have trying to send mail to the big names.

@martin @dnalounge Email addresses entered with purchases.

@scott Ah yes, Previously: "New Gmail war crime spotted in the wild" https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/01/new-gmail-war-crime-spotted-in-the-wild/

@jamesh Various local EDUs make a strong showing in there, but yes, presumably.

@jwz it looks like all four of the big universities in my city are on Office 365 mail these days.

That's quite a change from back when I was in uni, where each individual department ran their own independent mail systems.