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?

Paul,
Good study. Are you aware of how this might translate into absolute numbers of users?

Would this be just the US?

Regards,
Gary

FWIW - I believe part of the HOTMAIL adoption rates is perhaps due to all the versions of Outlook can import Hotmail INTO Outlook. So it acts like a low-level exchange server...

So you can get your Hotmail email in Outlook, or log onto any web computer and view your email there.

Just an idea.

What was a big surprise was that GMail wasn't as ubiquitous as it seemed. Good news there. Shows perhaps Google isn't as cool as we are led to believe.

Paul, these are interesting numbers - however I believe that great differences exist across countries? Yahoo is not very popular in Denmark, for example. Could be interesting to see these numbers broken down by country too.

And I'm a little curious: how do you tell the difference between an Outlook 2003 user running IE7 vs. one running IE6? How would the two show in the report?

As mentioned in your excellent screencast "Understanding desktop email clients" (http://litmusapp.com/resources/desktop-email-clients) both scenarios are possible.

Having been very surprised by these results, something then sprung to mind: if the data comes from mailing list subscriptions, it's likely to be very biased.

I use Outlook and Thunderbird for *real* e-mail, but when subscribing to a mailing list, I normally use a "throw-away" address such as Hotmail, Gmail, Mailinator and so on.

A quick straw poll around the office suggested this was common behaviour, so I suspect this leads to a significant skew in the data.

Interesting point, Rob. You may be right. I'd love to figure out a way to test that hypothesis.

Personally, I think that scenario is more likely within a technical audience. Amongst the general population (I'm thinking of my friends and family members here, rather than work colleagues), I wouldn't expect it to be anywhere near as common.

Useful information but now a little old.

Given changes in smart phone use and updated report would be most interesting, to highlight changes.

Tim - Agreed. We'll be publishing an full update to this report within the next month or so.