Mail server certificate · UK companies
What share of UK companies have a mail server presenting a self-signed or expired certificate?
1.59% of UK companies (95% CI 0.99–2.53%), measured across 1,071 companies on 2026-08-14.
Measured every Friday since 2026-08-01 — 5 observations to date. Last measured 2026-08-14.
How this is measured
Complete STARTTLS, inspect the leaf certificate. Denominator: MXs offering STARTTLS.
Passive measurement: a single DNS lookup, TLS handshake, or homepage GET per domain. Aggregate-only; no individual company is named. 95% Wilson confidence intervals. Population: national company registries (Companies House, Brreg, SIRENE), sampled by size band and resolved to email-active domains. Parked domains excluded. Snapshot: uk-companies-house-per600-seed20260728.
Licensed CC BY 4.0 — reuse with attribution to Quiet Failures. Download: JSON · CSV.
Why it matters
SMTP TLS is opportunistic (RFC 7435) — senders accept any certificate — so an invalid certificate still encrypts but authenticates nothing, leaving the connection open to interception. It only becomes a hard failure under DANE or MTA-STS enforce.
Limits of this measurement
Honesty demands the split. Because opportunistic TLS tolerates mismatches, only self_signed and expired are counted as the quiet failure; hostname_mismatch is reported but not counted.
The same check, other segments
- France micro companies6.62%
- France medium companies6.47%
- France companies6.06%
- France small companies5.78%
- France large companies5.38%
- global domains4.81%
- UK medium & large companies1.91%
- UK small companies1.52%