| NetEase 163 | |
|---|---|
| Domains | 163.com |
| Mail routing | 163mx01.mxmail.netease.com and its siblings, run by NetEase. |
| What we can resolve | We resolve few mailboxes here |
How NetEase 163 answers a probe
What the server does when we open a connection and ask about one address.
- Foreign connections are commonly refused, reset or timed out before any recipient verdict.
- NetEase runs 163.com and 126.com on shared infrastructure with the same posture toward outside probes.
- Where a connection does complete, the responses follow ordinary SMTP conventions.
- The accessible sample is too small and too biased to build a coverage expectation on.
The part that catches people out
What we do about it
We mark these as unknown and name the connection failure. On a mainland Chinese list, coverage is the honest headline and the number will be low.
Sending to NetEase 163 mailboxes
Verification is one step. These are the things that decide whether the message lands.
- Chinese regulatory requirements for commercial mail apply and sit outside deliverability practice.
- 163.com is common on business cards and B2B lists from Chinese suppliers, so it appears in trade data more than its consumer share suggests.
- Expect low engagement from foreign senders regardless of address validity.
An eleven-digit local part is a phone number
NetEase lets people use their mobile number as a mailbox name, so a supplier list will often contain rows like 13812345678@163.com. Eleven digits starting with 1 is the shape of a mainland Chinese mobile number. Say you have 500 rows on 163.com and 120 look like that. They aren't junk, and a validator that demands a letter in the local part will wrongly reject them at your form.
Those rows do deserve different handling. You're now holding a phone number, whether you asked for one or not, and privacy rules in most places treat that as more sensitive than a nickname. Decide who in your company can see that column. And don't pull the digits out to send texts. The person gave you an email address, and that's the only channel they agreed to.
Supplier domains that sit on NetEase
Personal domains aren't the whole footprint. NetEase's mail hosts follow one naming pattern: 163mx01.mxmail.netease.com for 163.com, and matching names for yeah.net, 188.com and vip.163.com, all confirmed in a lookup on September 19, 2026. Its business product puts company domains on the same parent, with hostnames that start with qiye163mx. So a factory with a proper-looking domain of its own may be one MX lookup away from the same reachability problem as a free account.
Run that lookup on the twenty supplier domains you care about most. For any that resolve to netease.com hosts, expect unknown from a probe outside China and plan to confirm the contact another way: a reply, a phone call, a message through the sourcing platform where you found them. On other hosts, verification may work normally, and it's worth a fraction of a cent per address to find out before a purchase order goes to a dead inbox.
Questions people ask
Can 163.com addresses be verified from outside China?
Rarely. The connection is usually refused before any recipient check happens, so the result is unknown rather than valid or invalid.
Is 126.com the same service?
Yes, NetEase runs both on shared infrastructure and they behave the same way.
Why do B2B lists carry so many 163.com addresses?
Chinese suppliers and trade contacts often use free NetEase accounts for business correspondence, so they appear on trade-show and directory data well beyond their consumer share.