Most cold-outreach playbooks are written for an American inbox: warm up for Gmail, watch your Microsoft SCL score, done. That works until your sequence crosses a border. When we sliced our DNS dataset by country — a 2026-04-28 snapshot of SPF records across the Tranco top-1M domains — the picture fragmented fast. Entire national markets run on ESPs and mail hosts that never appear in global market-share roundups, and each of them filters inbound mail differently.
This article maps the regional stacks an SDR actually hits when prospecting into Europe, Latin America and Asia, and what to change in your sending setup for each. All figures come from our daily email infrastructure report, built on OpenINTEL DNS snapshots of the top million domains.
The map: who actually sends each country's email
The share below is the percentage of a country's SPF-publishing domains that include a given provider. One domain can include several providers, so these are presence rates, not exclusive market shares.
| Country | Local champion | Share of SPF domains |
|---|---|---|
| Brazil | Locaweb | 42.58% (2,090 domains) |
| Russia | Unisender | 38.21% |
| France | Mailjet | 35.88% |
| India | MailHostBox | 29.29% |
| Italy | MailUp | 22.9% |
| Switzerland | Infomaniak | 20.86% (#2 in-country) |
| Sweden | APSIS | 16.72% (#3 in-country) |
| UK, Australia, Canada, Spain | Mailchimp (#1) | 20–24% |
| Germany, NL, Belgium, Switzerland | Mandrill (#1) | 25–27% |
Two patterns stand out. First, the Anglosphere plus Spain behaves like one market: Mailchimp leads everywhere at 20–24%. Second, the DACH and Benelux region is Mandrill country at 25–27% — a transactional pipe, not a marketing suite, which tells you local companies there tend to build email into their own products rather than buy campaign tools.
What each cluster means for your outreach
Brazil: one company is the mail system
Locaweb shows up in 42.58% of Brazilian SPF domains, and KingHost — another local host — has a client base that is 99.8% Brazilian. Practically, this means a large share of your Brazilian prospects receive mail through local hosting infrastructure, not Gmail or Microsoft 365. Local hosts run their own spam filtering, often simpler and more rule-based than Google's engagement models: authentication failures, blocklisted IPs and Portuguese-language spam heuristics matter more; engagement history matters less. Send in Portuguese, keep HTML light, and make sure your SPF and DKIM are flawless — a rule-based filter gives you no second chance on a technical fail.
France and Italy: local ESPs with local rules
Mailjet's 35.88% presence in France and MailUp's 22.9% in Italy mean the receiving side of your sequence often lives next to a local ESP stack. These markets also skew toward strong privacy norms: GDPR enforcement is real, and French and Italian prospects are quicker to report unsolicited English-language mail. The fix is boring but effective — write in the local language, reference a legitimate interest, and keep volume per domain conservative.
DACH and Benelux: product-led email cultures
Mandrill leading Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland at 25–27% signals engineering-led companies that wired transactional email into their own systems. Expect more self-hosted and gateway-style receiving too, and expect stricter human norms: German-speaking business culture treats unsolicited email far less forgivingly than the US market does. Short, factual, formal openers outperform casual US-style hooks here.
Russia and India: hosting-bundled email
Unisender at 38.21% in Russia and MailHostBox at 29.29% in India both point to the same structural fact: email is bundled with hosting and domain registration in these markets. Deliverability depends less on engagement reputation and more on not tripping infrastructure-level blocks. Warm up slowly and monitor bounces per country segment, not per campaign.
At least 8 ESPs in our dataset serve one country almost exclusively — KingHost's base is 99.8% Brazilian, and several Japanese providers are 100% domestic. Averaged into a global top-1M number, they round to noise. Sliced by country, they are the market. See the per-country tables in the daily report for the full breakdown.
A practical workflow: map before you send
- Segment your list by country first, then by mailbox provider. A German prospect on self-hosted mail and a Brazilian one on Locaweb need different volume ramps and different copy.
- Look up the receiving stack:
dig MX prospect-domain.comanddig TXT prospect-domain.comshow you the mailbox host and the sending tools in seconds. Batch this across your list before the first send. - Localize the sending side too. A .de or .fr reply-to domain and local-language copy measurably reduce spam-folder routing with regional filters that weight language heuristics.
- Set per-region volume caps. Rule-based local filters block faster and unblock slower than Gmail. Start at a fraction of your US volume and scale on observed placement.
The last step is verification. Regional filters are exactly where assumptions fail silently: your sequence reports "delivered" while every message sits in a Locaweb spam folder. Before launching a country segment, run an inbox placement test against seed mailboxes in that region — it is the only way to see what a Brazilian or German filter actually did with your message, as opposed to what your ESP logged.