Percentages Of E-mail Clients By OS And By Feature?

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?"

Comments

Email review

[pleitner]

I currently work at a University in Australia that will remain unnamed. We have recently commissioned an email review in an attempt to standardise things a bit more than the scarey mess that is out there at the moment.

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):

• elm/pine: 10% - mostly the UNIX-centric areas such as Comp Sci and some of the other Science areas.

• Pegasus: 10% - mostly legacy, but you know how academics are.

• Outlook: 20% - this is (unfortunately) the way we are moving.

• Groupwise: 30% - we have a large NDS infrastructure and, for better or worse, this is the way we were going before the email review said otherwise.

• Eudora: 30% - this is historical and is being replaced with Outlook just because the email review said so.

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?

info gathering idea

[griffjon]

hey! the problem is unlike the web it's hard to gather stats on email clients, right? So, let's just like send this email around asking people to put their email client on the list at the top, and forward it on, and every hundredth can cc it to a central location....

...waitaminute. ;)

Seriously, tho, you could get rough numbers on Outlook users from the LoveBug stories I'd wager.

You could find out with an e-mail worm...

[DanPeng]

Why not write a cross-platform network worm that spreads via e-mail? Every time it hits a client, it tells a central server what program it finds. It could spread automatically if it finds an Outlook client, and spread on the honor system for anything else. Just ask people to run this EXE file or shell script or visit this web site and see what you get. ;-)