Announcing early results of my survey of SMTP servers

Since June 2007 I have been building as close to an exhaustive survey of SMTP servers connected to the Internet as possible. This has involved coming up with a method for finding IP addresses to probe, probing those IP addresses, and generating results from the data collected. That code has been "finished" for a while now, and I am now ready to make it available to the public.

The current data set includes 46,135,101 IP addresses, with 1,942,603 successfully identified servers. The results for the survey are online, as well as status information for the machines running the measurement system (a different view of that data is available as well). You can even lookup your favourite domain name to see what software its running.

This is the most recent open survey of SMTP servers that I am aware of. There have been other surveys, but they are either quite old or don't make their data publically accessible. Its quite possible there are bugs in the web site which displays the data, so please let me know if you find one. Apart from that, I hope this data is useful to others.

<form name="lookup" action="http://smtpsurvey.stillhq.com/smtp-survey.cgi" method="post">Use this form to lookup what mail server software a given domain is using. Remember to enter a domain name (like ibm.com), not a hostname (like www.ibm.com).

Lookup: <input type="text" name="lookup" size=50> <input type="submit" value="Submit"></form>

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Syndicated 2008-03-20 01:54:00 from stillhq.com : Mikal, a geek from Canberra living in Silicon Valley