Re: email client popularity [was Webmail is implementation, not Internet

> I also wonder about the accuracy of the numbers. They say Apple’s MUAs
> command 44% of the email MUA market (iPhone+iPad+MacOS).
> That seems just a tiny bit high, considering Apple commands 40% of all
> smartphones, 33% of all tablets, and under 8% of desktops.
All they are saying that those are the email clients they see accessing the
messages sent by the folks who use their service. This has very little to do
with the phone/laptop  market overall. A lot of people never access their email
from their smart phone or tablet; indeed, there are a fair number who never do
anything "smart" with their phone at all.

Assuming the numbers are actually representative of mobile email use on a
broader scale, at most what they are telling you is that the percentage of
people who actually make use of their phone's capabilities for email may be
higher for iPhones/iPads.

                                Ned

> On Jun 14, 2014, at 4:21 PM, ned+ietf(_at_)mauve(_dot_)mrochek(_dot_)com 
> wrote:
> > > Ned,
> > > On 15/06/2014 02:42, ned+ietf(_at_)mauve(_dot_)mrochek(_dot_)com wrote:
> > > ...
> > > > Some data to support this conclusion:
> > > [that webmail is not dominant]
> > > >  http://emailclientmarketshare.com/
> > > Hmm. I was curious about what those numbers really measure.
> > > Judging by http://litmus.com/email-analytics, it seems that
> > > they refer to a sample of emails that (a) contained a specific
> > > HTML snippet and were (b) opened as HTML by the clients and
> > > (c) by implication, had been sent via a mailing list.
> > Litmus is a service for people who send out bulk mail and want to track
> > whether or not it's seen, and when it's seen what client is used to see it.
> >
> > > It seems
> > > very likely to me that the sample consisted of spam.
> > Actually, it's unlikely in the extreme. Spammers are into volume, they don't
> > care about tracking analytics and aren't going to pay a company like Litmus 
> > to
> > perform such a service. But there are a hell of a lot of legitimate bulk 
> > email
> > senders out there who do care about the effectiveness of their mail, and 
> > have
> > the money to pay for such things.
> >
> > > I'm
> > > not sure that the numbers reflect unbiased statistics, unless
> > > you're a spammer. In any case they don't indicate how many
> > > people open email in plain text mode (which I alway do if
> > > possible, precisely to avoid embedded code).
> > Well, I think it's up to you to show that a significant fraction of the
> > email-reading public prefers to read HTML mail without resolving any of the
> > links, and that missing out on that fraction significantly biases such data.
> >
> > > That said, they certainly show that one size doesn't fit all.
> > Which was the main point.
> >
> >                             Ned