If you plan email for a company expanding into Europe, the first instinct is to look at global ESP market share and pick a household name. The data says that instinct is wrong. As of the 2026-07-05 snapshot of our daily OpenINTEL-based scan of the Tranco top-1M — 623,370 domains publishing SPF — Europe is not one email market. It is a patchwork of national markets, and several of them are dominated by providers that barely register in global statistics.
The headline example: Mailjet holds just 2.12% of SPF domains worldwide, yet among French domains its share is 35.88% (measured on the 2026-04-28 per-country cut of the same dataset). That is not a rounding artifact. It is a different market with different rules, and it repeats country by country across the continent.
The European ESP map, from DNS
We classify a domain's ESP from the include: mechanisms in its SPF record, using 310+ patterns. Here is what the per-country cut shows for Europe:
| Market | Local champion | Share of SPF domains |
|---|---|---|
| France | Mailjet | 35.88% |
| Italy | MailUp | 22.9% |
| Switzerland | Infomaniak (#2) | 20.86% |
| Sweden | APSIS (#3) | 16.72% |
| Germany / NL / Belgium / Switzerland | Mandrill (#1) | 25–27% |
| UK / Spain | Mailchimp (#1) | 20–24% |
Two patterns jump out. First, the UK and Spain behave like the English-language global market: Mailchimp leads at 20–24%, roughly what you would expect from worldwide numbers. Second, everywhere else a local or regional player either leads outright or sits on the podium — MailUp in Italy, Infomaniak in Switzerland, APSIS in Sweden. If your rollout plan treats Paris, Milan and Stockholm as one "EMEA" region with one ESP, you are planning against the grain of how those markets actually send.
Why local champions keep winning
These are not nostalgia purchases. Three forces keep national ESPs on top of their home markets:
- Language and support. Deliverability incidents are stressful conversations. A French marketing team escalating a blocklist issue at 4pm on a Friday wants a French-speaking support engineer, native French UI, and templates that handle French typography correctly.
- GDPR and data-residency comfort. An EU-headquartered processor with EU data centers simplifies the DPA conversation with legal. For regulated industries and public-sector clients, "the data never leaves the EU" is often a hard requirement, not a preference.
- Deliverability at domestic ISPs. Beyond Gmail and Microsoft, each market has consumer mailbox providers with their own filtering quirks — Orange and Free in France, local telco mail in Italy and Scandinavia. A domestic ESP has spent a decade building sender reputation and postmaster relationships exactly where your subscribers live.
The same dynamic is even stronger outside Europe — Locaweb holds 42.58% of Brazilian SPF domains and Unisender 38.21% of Russian ones — which we cover in our country-by-country ESP breakdown. Europe is simply the version of this story that most expansion plans underestimate.
The Mandrill anomaly in DACH and Benelux
The oddest line in the table is Mandrill: the transactional arm of Mailchimp is the #1 ESP by SPF share in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland at 25–27% of each country's SPF domains. Globally Mandrill sits at 3.37%, down from its 5.58% peak — a legacy platform by most definitions. Its DACH/Benelux position looks like accumulated infrastructure: agencies and platforms that standardized on Mandrill for transactional mail years ago and never had a reason to migrate. The lesson for planners is that SPF records reflect installed base, not current purchasing preference — and installed base is exactly what your deliverability will share IP pools and filtering heuristics with.
A practical decision framework
None of this means you must sign four contracts for four countries. It means the decision should be explicit rather than defaulted:
- Consolidate on one global ESP if your European audience is mostly B2B on Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 — corporate filtering is broadly provider-agnostic, and operational simplicity wins.
- Go local in markets where a large share of your list sits on domestic consumer ISPs, where data-residency requirements are strict, or where the local champion's share (Mailjet at 35.88%, MailUp at 22.9%) signals postmaster relationships you cannot replicate quickly.
- Hybrid is legitimate: a global ESP for product and transactional mail, a local one for the French or Italian marketing program. Multi-ESP stacks are already the norm in the data — SPF shares sum to well over 100% across the dataset.
A local champion's trajectory matters as much as its share. Before signing, check whether the provider's domain share is growing or shrinking in the daily email infrastructure report — a declining series can be an early sign of client exodus, as the MailChannels case showed.
Test each market before you commit
Whatever you choose, do not extrapolate deliverability from your home market. The same campaign, the same list hygiene and the same ESP can land in the inbox at Gmail and in spam at a French or Italian consumer ISP. Run seed tests per market before the migration and after every major change: send to mailboxes at the local providers your subscribers actually use, not just Gmail and Outlook, and compare placement between your current ESP and the local candidate. One afternoon of testing is cheaper than discovering a 20-point placement gap after you have moved the list.