Litmus

Makes for a very interesting read, I was especially surprised to see that Outlook is not the most popular business email client, what are you thoughts on this? :)

Thanks Nathan, glad you found it useful.

That's an excellent question regarding Outlook. However, if you combine both the Outlook stats, it reaches 35%, i.e. more share than Hotmail.

I thought it was important to break down the difference between 2003 and earlier, and 2007, because of the huge rendering differences.

I was still surprised to see Hotmail so high on the list, though.

hi paul,

thanks for doing this study - very interesting.

i too was very surprised about hotmail. my most immediate thoughts are that perhaps people are viewing the mailing outside of work, and also that they may be using a non-work email address to subscribe to the mailing, even though it is a 'business' mailing.

could you tell me - what is the breakdown of geographic regions of participants? would you consider this to be a US-centric study?

thanks,
denise

Hi There,

Very interesting indeed.

Do you know what percentage of people use Outlook2002 specifically?

Thanks

Denise: Glad you found it useful! Unfortunately, we don't have accurate per-recipient data on location. However, we do know that the majority of the mailing lists analysed are based in the US and the UK so it's likely their recipients are also.

Ben: Unfortunately we're not yet able to differentiate between Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2002. Sorry about that.

Hi Paul,
Really interesting report - thanks for making it available for all to see.

I'm interested to know why Outlook Express isn't on this though as its shipped with most copies of XP and I thought it was popular...?

Or is it contained in your "Outlook 200x" results perhaps?

Keep up the great work!

Laura

Laura: Really glad you found it useful! You're correct that Outlook Express users are counted amongst the other Outlook statistics.

Good job Paul!

Like the other readers, the thought that came to my mind was ... " hmmmm... very interesting! "

Seems that the reasons for so much Hotmail and web based mail... gmail, yahoo and others is because they are free, and because the consumer market that has moved into the internet realm. Consumers in general know just enough about computers to get on the internet to shop. (Meaning the majority of email users are not real computer savvy.)

Could there be a possibility that this study shows that Hotmail, and Outlook are the loosest in letting your survey come through, and the smaller market shares more secure in blocking it, as though it was spam?

Maybe in a few years Google (gmail) will take over the world instead of Microsoft (hotmail).

The reason people would want to look for such a report as this, is to make an intelligent decision on what to do about their email client tools. For security reasons I would stick to the smaller market shares.

I am glad you did this study. Thank you.

http://friendfeed.com/e/450025cb-26ac-462f-abae-7355ff0aad17/Email-Client-Statistics-Fingerprint/
your turn! ; )

Erhan: Thanks for the link. I answered some of the specific questions in your comments.

Thanks for publishing these stats, very interesting stuff. I'm looking forward to using the tool to conduct some research on our own lists.

Incidentally, how often is the survey blocked? Do you have any figures for how many times the survey failed to return information because the image was blocked?