Percentages Of E-mail Clients By OS And By Feature? 26
Krotus asks: "I've been looking for information on user shares of popular e-mail clients, and am really surprised at how hard it is to find anything beyond vague speculations. I suspect that lots of us could use these numbers, but has anyone been able to find out about what percentages of users are using Eudora, Outlook's various versions, mutt, pine, mh, Notes, etc.? Almost as useful would be numbers on what percentage of clients can parse HTML, vs. plaintext or something proprietary.
Forrester, Jupiter, and IDC have all come up blank. The question has been asked at Abuzz with no luck. Maybe the collective knowledge of Slashdot will be more fruitful?"
Email review (Score:3)
Despite the fact that the review process was very flawed and a total con (typical of consultants), it very clearly outlined that there is a huge mix of both email clients and email servers out there and that we really should look at standardising the clients and consolidating the servers.
Part of the process was a survey of current usage across campus. The client side results were (from memory, in no order and staff only):
The students mostly use Eudora, although the use of our internal student webmail system is starting to increase quite dramatically.
There is also quite extensive use of free web based email (such as hotmail), but I don't have any stats on this. We are actively discouraging its use, but the Uni doesn't have any real balls when it comes to making policy about it.
The really sad bit about all this is that the review process somehow decided that Exchange is the best server solution. Can anyone say Linux box running SMTP/POP/IMAP?
Why the surprise? (Score:1)
info gathering idea (Score:2)
...waitaminute.
Seriously, tho, you could get rough numbers on Outlook users from the LoveBug stories I'd wager.
BeOS Mail (Score:1)
What email clients are in use (Score:1)
Many people i deal with end up using Outlook Express because it comes with Windows, at least form a windows persepctive. It's fine for base needs.
Re:What email clients are in use (Score:1)
Would that be like the needs I suspect were being addressed by the unsolicited e-mails I recently got about "hot escorts"?
Re:Email review (Score:1)
That blank space at the top must make the diplomas look strange, or do they use the symbol that Prince recently ceased to need?
Outlook Would have to lead (Score:1)
You could find out with an e-mail worm... (Score:2)
Re:Why the surprise? (Score:1)
Really, the only way to find out what clients are in use is to actually ask people in a survey, which probably wouldn't cover too many users.
I agree, this is probably the only good way to find out. Why not ask /. to run a poll? Granted, it's hardly a random sample, but at least it's a large sample and it's better than nothing.
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Re:What email clients are in use (Score:1)
I used Microsft Mail (when 95 first came out). That sucked. Then it became Outlook... even worse - they took away Schedule+ and combined it. Now Outlook is even worse than Lotus Notes...
On my linux box, I use Pine and Kmail (not overly impressed). I'll probably try to get Eudora running in Wine. If it is stable, that's one less thing I need to hold on to Windows for (MS Money - believe it or not - is another. A rather nice program).
Possible solution -- logging. (Score:1)
1. Find population that you're interested (say mit.edu addresses)
2. have the SMTP damon on mit.edu save the X-mailer headers, devoid of any personal data.
3. Make statistics...
I mean, granted lots of people may use different smtp servers (you'll miss some of the CS folk) but at least it'd be realatively accurate...
Why doesn't forester or some other research group partner with @home, pacbell, and some of the other bigg'o providers and log for a couple of days...
comments?
willis
aol, hotmail, yahoo (Score:1)
I'm sure in business outlook is pretty big -- but most of the students I know use Eudora or plain'ol webmail... (I myself use pine).
yeah...
willis.
Re:Why the surprise? (Score:1)
Slashdot already did that one. [slashdot.org]
Re:Why the surprise? (Score:1)
Arrgh. I only checked a few pages worth. A search form would be nice.
Still, I see they've repeated the "how many email addresses do you have" one, so why not this one too? It was almost a year ago.
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Re:Possible solution -- logging. (Score:1)
one method out be do some sort of usenet search, but this might not representative either, since not all email users are on usenet, and the usenet population seem to be more experienced in that sort of thing. That may bias results.
Remember when sending out spam, the lowest common denominator of plain text is readable by the most people.
:)
Re:What email clients are in use (Score:1)
original intent & grep -h "X-Mailer" ~/Mail/* (Score:1)
The reason why you'd want to check the X-Mailer is to see who is sending the message... but the overall goal is figuring out who READS the message with WHAT client. Therefore, things like your scripts, etc. should be tossed out from the get-go -- they give no useful information about what a particular person is using to READ the message.
(i.e. if I send mail from hotmail, then I probably read it from there too... I probably don't read mail from
>I have used several e-mail clients, and NONE of them have ever put their name in the headers.
grep -h "X-Mailer" ~/Mail/* | sort -u >foo
X-Mailer: Web Mail 3.5.1.4
X-Mailer: Allaire ColdFusion Application Server
X-Mailer: Juno 1.49
X-Mailer: Kana Customer Messaging System 3.0
X-Mailer::1.0 (http://www.gossamer-threads.com/scripts/)
X-Mailer: AOL NetMail version 2.0
X-Mailer: Becky! ver 1.25.07
X-Mailer: AOL 4.0 for Windows sub 30
X-Mailer: eGroups Message Poster
X-Mailer: USANET web-mailer (M3.0.0.70)
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2314.1300
X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Pro Version 4.2.0.58
X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 (Macintosh; U; PPC)
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook CWS, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2910.0)
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL34 (25)]
X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2650.21)
X-Mailer: MIME-tools 4.104 (Entity 4.117)
there are a bunch more, too. Notice how some of these don't represent a mail client that somebody's actually using (a coldfusion client? sounds like a form to me) and thus shouldn't be counted...
Also, some things clients might need to be teased out (pine, hotmail, aol (v5?), etc.) but they probably all have unique fingerprints like below...
Received: from 12.73.227.x by www.hotmail.com with HTTP
Received: from imo-d09.mx.aol.com
Message-ID:
the only thing that I didn't get a fingerprint on was
(I don't think I know anybody who uses Pegasus -- that might be why there's no peg. client listed. I'm sure there's a fingerprint lurking in its headers as well, same with MUTT, etc.)
willis
Re:What email clients are in use (Score:1)
Re:What email clients are in use (Score:1)
Adam
Percentages (Score:1)
Client Server Survival Guide, 3rd Edition. Robert Orfali, Dan Harkey, Jeri Edwards. page 408
Derived from data from IDC, Dataquest and EMMS
Other- 19.5% (29.9 M)
Notes 14.3% (21.9 M)
Eudora 11.8% (18.0 M)
cc:Mail 9.8% (15.0 M)
Exchange 9.8% (15.0 M)
Groupwise 8.1% (12.4 M)
Hotmail 6.6% (10.0 M)
Software.com 6.6% (10.0 M)
MS Mail 3.9% ( 6.0 M)
HP OpenMail 3.5% ( 5.4 M)
Suitespot 3.4% ( 5.2 M)
FirstClass 2.7% ( 4.2 M)
Re:What email clients are in use (Score:1)
Re:What email clients are in use (Score:1)
Due to the nature of the content, plain text won't really work, as it can contain tables. Unfortunatly last time I looked at the source of such a message, it was generated with a variant of Outlook, so it contains some MS specific tags.
Is there any decent Linux mail client that can handle HTML mail properly? Netscape Communicator fails to handle some of the tags at all.
IDC or Ferris.com (Score:1)
Re:info gathering idea (Score:1)
...and get the number of pine users from the smug replies and evil cackling.
Found some useful data (Score:1)