email-transport · severity low

Mail server reverse DNS

Share of mail servers with no reverse-DNS (PTR) record — a common, quiet cause of degraded deliverability.

Measured every Friday · last updated

How it is measured

Tier 0. Resolve the MX, then PTR on the reversed address (bounded DNS query). Denominator: has_mx.

Why it matters

Missing reverse DNS is a classic quiet failure — nothing breaks visibly, but receiving mail systems downgrade or reject on it, so outbound deliverability degrades in ways that surface as "our email sometimes doesn't arrive".

The base rate

Two independent populations. The global, domain-anchored figure is unbiased; the company-anchored figures are built by matching company names to domains and skew toward more digitally-mature firms. Both are published, so the gap is visible.

Global (all domains) 5.13% fail · n=1,462
present: 94.87%no record: 5.13%
France companies 7.83% fail · n=805
present: 92.17%no record: 7.83%
UK companies 4.83% fail · n=1,450
present: 95.17%no record: 4.83%
Norway companies 1.14% fail · n=879
present: 98.86%no record: 1.14%
present · 98.86%no record · 1.14%

By company size band

Company-anchored cuts (national registries with a size proxy), split by size band. Right-hand figure is the share not meeting the control.

France
micron=208
present: 91.35%no record: 8.65%
8.65%
smalln=235
present: 91.91%no record: 8.09%
8.09%
mediumn=187
present: 91.44%no record: 8.56%
8.56%
largen=175
present: 94.29%no record: 5.71%
5.71%
UK
micron=131
present: 95.42%no record: 4.58%
4.58%
smalln=539
present: 96.85%no record: 3.15%
3.15%
medium/largen=560
present: 95%no record: 5%
5%
dormantn=108
present: 89.81%no record: 10.19%
10.19%
no-accountsn=112
present: 92.86%no record: 7.14%
7.14%
Norway
micron=251
present: 98.8%no record: 1.2%
1.2%
smalln=229
present: 98.25%no record: 1.75%
1.75%
mediumn=234
present: 99.15%no record: 0.85%
0.85%
largen=165
present: 99.39%no record: 0.61%
0.61%

Every segment

Pick one to see the citable answer for a company like yours, with its trend and methodology.

Show the remaining 5 segments

Slices below 100 measured members are withheld rather than shown with a wide interval — an absent country or issuer means too little data, not zero failures. Licensed CC BY 4.0. Machine-readable data per segment: append .json or .csv to its URL.