The four mailbox providers

Transcript

Stay chill. Every email lands with a mailbox provider, and each one decides for itself which senders to trust. Here's how the platform sorts your mail for them.

Every address belongs to one of four buckets. Google: Gmail and Google Workspace. Microsoft: Outlook, Hotmail and Office 365. Yahoo, which includes AOL. And everyone else.

The bucket comes from who handles the mail, not from how the address looks. Take an address at a company. Its domain's mail server is looked up, once for the whole domain. If that company's mail runs on Google, the address goes in the Google bucket.

Every sending domain has a quota with each provider. Mail drips into each bucket at its own pace, spread across the sending window. And each bucket grows only on its own evidence.

Each provider decides for itself whether to trust a sender. So each bucket is paced on its own, and grows on its own record. And every provider sees your mail arrive at a natural pace.

That's the four buckets: every address sorted by the provider that receives its mail. Next up: see how each domain's quota sets the pace of its mail. Don't freeze up!