Free email providers: the list and what counts as personal

A free email provider gives anyone an address on its own shared domain, such as gmail.com, outlook.com or yahoo.com. Because one domain serves huge numbers of unrelated people, an address there says nothing about where the person works, so business email checks treat it as personal. The list is longer than most people expect: regional webmail, ISP mailboxes and paid privacy services all count. This post covers the main providers by region, the edge cases, and why every list goes stale.

Our full list of shared provider domains is open data: download it here.

What counts as a free email provider

The test is “one domain, many unrelated people”, not price. A provider is shared when anyone can sign up for an address on its domain. That’s the property that makes the domain useless as a company signal, whether the account is free or paid.

The verdict follows the domain, not the company that runs the servers. Google runs consumer Gmail and Google Workspace. Microsoft runs Outlook.com and Microsoft 365. The same servers can host a personal address on a shared domain and a business address on a company’s own domain.

Address	Personal?	Why
jane@gmail.com	Yes	Google’s consumer domain, open to anyone
jane@icloud.com	Yes	Apple’s shared domain, even for paying iCloud+ users
jane@proton.me	Yes	A privacy provider’s shared domain
jane@comcast.net	Yes	An ISP domain shared by subscribers
jane@acme.io on Google Workspace	No	The company’s own domain
jane@acme.io on an iCloud+ custom domain	No	The owner’s domain, hosted on a consumer service

In the isBusinessEmail API, a shared domain returns category: "personal" and is_free_provider: true. As Response fields puts it, “free” means “not the company’s own domain”. For the full definition, see What is a business email?

The global providers

These are the providers almost everyone has heard of. Each one has more domains than people remember.

Provider	Shared domains	Notes
Gmail	gmail.com, googlemail.com	Both deliver to the same inboxes
Outlook.com	outlook.com, hotmail.com, live.com, msn.com, plus country versions such as hotmail.co.uk, outlook.de, live.fr	Old Hotmail and Live addresses still work
Yahoo Mail	yahoo.com, country versions such as yahoo.co.uk, yahoo.fr, yahoo.com.br, plus ymail.com, rocketmail.com
iCloud Mail	icloud.com, me.com, mac.com	Custom domains on iCloud+ are a different case
AOL Mail	aol.com, aim.com	Receives mail on Yahoo’s servers
GMX and mail.com	gmx.com, gmx.net, gmx.de, mail.com, email.com, usa.com, post.com	One company; mail.com also offers profession-style domains such as engineer.com
Zoho Mail	zohomail.com, zoho.com	Zoho also hosts company mail on custom domains

Watch out for the profession-style domains. engineer.com or accountant.com sound like a business, but anyone can pick them at sign-up.

Regional webmail providers

In many countries, people use a local provider instead of, or alongside, Gmail. To someone who has never heard of them, these domains look like company domains. That’s a common way for a do-it-yourself check to go wrong.

Country	Common shared domains
Germany	web.de, gmx.de, freenet.de
France	orange.fr, free.fr, sfr.fr, laposte.net
Italy	libero.it, virgilio.it, alice.it, tiscali.it
Czech Republic	seznam.cz, email.cz, centrum.cz
Poland	wp.pl, o2.pl, interia.pl, onet.pl
Baltics	inbox.lv, inbox.lt, mail.ee
Russia	yandex.ru, ya.ru, mail.ru, inbox.ru, list.ru, bk.ru, rambler.ru
Ukraine, Bulgaria	ukr.net, i.ua, abv.bg
China	qq.com, foxmail.com, 163.com, 126.com, sina.com, sohu.com
South Korea	naver.com, daum.net, hanmail.net
Japan	yahoo.co.jp
India	rediffmail.com
Brazil	uol.com.br, bol.com.br, terra.com.br

A few things worth knowing:

• Numeric addresses are normal on qq.com. QQ Mail addresses are often the user’s QQ number, like 123456789@qq.com. That isn’t a sign of a bot.
• Yahoo Japan is its own service. yahoo.co.jp is run separately from Yahoo Mail elsewhere, but it’s just as shared.
• Some of these companies also sell business mail. Yandex 360 and Zoho, for example, host companies on their own domains. An address on the company’s domain is business, even when the provider’s own domain is on this list.

ISP mailboxes

Internet providers have long given subscribers an address on their own domain. Those domains are shared by every customer, so they’re personal, even when a small business uses one for years.

Country	ISP domains
United States	comcast.net, att.net, sbcglobal.net, bellsouth.net, verizon.net, cox.net, charter.net, earthlink.net, optonline.net
Canada	shaw.ca, rogers.com, sympatico.ca, telus.net
United Kingdom	btinternet.com, sky.com, virginmedia.com, talktalk.net, ntlworld.com
Germany	t-online.de, arcor.de
France	orange.fr, wanadoo.fr, free.fr, sfr.fr
Netherlands, Belgium	ziggo.nl, kpnmail.nl, telenet.be, skynet.be
Australia, New Zealand	bigpond.com, optusnet.com.au, xtra.co.nz
Japan	ocn.ne.jp, nifty.com, mobile carrier mail such as docomo.ne.jp

Two things make ISP mail tricky:

• The mail often runs elsewhere. Some ISPs outsource their mailboxes to the big webmail providers; AT&T’s mail domains, for example, point their MX records at Yahoo’s mail servers. That’s useful: a new alias domain on the same servers can be spotted from its MX records alone.
• Addresses outlive the service. ISPs retire or hand off their mail services over the years, but old addresses stay in CRMs and on sign-up forms for a long time. Even “business” ISP products, such as btconnect.com from BT, put many unrelated customers on one domain.

Privacy-focused and paid providers

Paying for email doesn’t make it a business address. These services are personal on their own domains:

Service	Shared domains
Proton Mail	proton.me, protonmail.com, protonmail.ch, pm.me
Tuta (formerly Tutanota)	tuta.com, tutanota.com, tutanota.de, tutamail.com, tuta.io
Fastmail	fastmail.com, fastmail.fm
HEY	hey.com
Posteo	posteo.de
mailbox.org	mailbox.org
Hushmail	hushmail.com

Most of them also let customers bring their own domain. That changes the answer. jane@acme.io on Proton, Fastmail or Zoho is on Acme’s domain, so it’s business. In our API the domain stays business, and workspace.other_suite names the suite (for example Zoho, Proton or Fastmail) so you know Google- or Microsoft-only integrations won’t apply.

Custom domains on iCloud+ are business too, with lower confidence. Plenty of them are one person’s vanity domain rather than a company. The mx_consumer_host reason code flags this (reason codes).

Disposable and relay addresses are not free providers

Free providers, disposable inboxes and privacy relays all fail the “is it a company?” test, but they mean different things and deserve different handling.

Type	Example domains	What it is	Typical B2B handling
Free provider	gmail.com, gmx.de, qq.com	A long-lived personal inbox	Ask for a work email, or allow and route differently
Disposable	mailinator.com, guerrillamail.com	An inbox that lasts minutes or hours	Block
Relay	privaterelay.appleid.com, mozmail.com, duck.com	An alias that forwards to a hidden real inbox	Ask for a work email

Keep them in separate lists. If you merge them, you either block real people on Gmail as harshly as throwaway inboxes, or let throwaway inboxes through as gently as Gmail. Check disposable domains with the disposable email checker or the disposable domains list. Relays are covered in Email verification vs email classification.

Why free email provider lists go stale

Every list of free email domains starts decaying the day it’s published:

1. New domains. Providers add country versions and aliases, and new webmail services launch.
2. Rebrands. ProtonMail became Proton Mail and added proton.me. Tutanota became Tuta and added tuta.com. Lists that only knew the old names miss the new ones.
3. Closures and handoffs. ISPs shut down or outsource mail, and small providers disappear, while their addresses keep circulating.
4. Mixed-up categories. Open free-provider lists mix in disposable domains, and open disposable lists sometimes include real providers. A copy-pasted list inherits both mistakes.
5. The long tail. Thousands of small webmail services, community domains and hosting companies’ free mail exist. No list has all of them.

Here’s how we handle it. Our list starts from an open-source list of free email domains plus our own curated core of major providers and ISPs; curated entries win when upstream lists disagree. It’s rebuilt nightly. For domains no list knows yet, DNS fills the gap: MX on a consumer-only host such as gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com, or on mail servers shared by several known free providers, still means personal.

Mistakes still get through. If you find one, report it through the API’s feedback endpoint: reports are reviewed by people and never applied automatically.

Using a free email provider list in your own code

If you’d rather run the check yourself, a list gets you most of the way. A few rules keep it accurate:

1. Normalize the domain. Lowercase it, remove a trailing dot, and convert international domains to punycode.
2. Match the domain and its parents, never substrings.
3. Check disposable and relay lists first. The more specific category should win.
4. Fall back to DNS for domains that aren’t on any list.
5. Refresh the list regularly. A copy from last year misses new domains and rebrands.

import { readFileSync } from 'node:fs';

// One domain per line, from https://isbusinessemail.com/lists/free-email-providers.txt
const FREE = new Set(readFileSync('free-email-providers.txt', 'utf8').split('\n').filter(Boolean));

export function isFreeProvider(email) {
  const domain = email.slice(email.lastIndexOf('@') + 1).trim().toLowerCase().replace(/\.$/, '');
  const labels = domain.split('.');
  // mail.example.com matches example.com; "mail" inside a name matches nothing.
  for (let i = 0; i < labels.length - 1; i++) {
    if (FREE.has(labels.slice(i).join('.'))) return true;
  }
  return false;
}

To skip the maintenance, check one address with the free email provider checker, a CSV with the bulk email checker, or call the API and read is_free_provider (check endpoint). Check for a business email in JavaScript, Python and PHP has the complete version, with MX lookups.

Next steps

Knowing an address is personal is the easy part. Deciding what to do with it is the real choice:

• Should you block personal addresses at all? Read Should B2B SaaS block free email signups? and the block free emails at sign-up use case.
• Implementing it on a form: How to require a work email at sign-up covers copy, exceptions and typo suggestions.
• Scoring leads: see B2B lead qualification.

Read next: How to find out which email provider a company uses, from MX records to Microsoft 365 tenant discovery.