More Than Half of Emails Worldwide Are Now Opened in a Mobile Environment (emarketer.com)

A reader shares a research report: The world of email marketing has changed pretty significantly over the past five years. Where desktop clients like Outlook were once a more important delivery medium, readers of email are now in the thrall of mobile clients and webmail services like Gmail. In fact, new research from Return Path found that more than half of emails worldwide (55%) are opened in a mobile environment in 2017, significantly more than either webmail (28%) or desktop (16%). Mobile has emerged as the dominant email environment since Return Path last conducted its survey in 2012, when only 29% of emails were opened on a mobile device, and webmail clients were the most popular method of accessing such electronic missives. Return Path also found that Apple's iOS was dominant among mobile email users worldwide, with 79% of mobile emails opened on either an iPhone or iPad this year. While only 20% of emails were opened on a device running Android, that was actually an increase of 6 percentage points from 2012's figure.

Comments

Re:What email? in mobile?

[fisted]

I know you're joking, but still:

sms

Not free, not reliably (yes it usually works, that doesn't change that it's not reliable)

tweet

Centralized, goes away when whoever owns twitter loses interest or goes out of business. Ads likely. Data mining likely.

fb msg

Centralized, goes away when whoever owns facebook loses interest or goes out of business. Ads guaranteed. Data mining guaranteed.

snachat

Centralized, goes away when whoever owns snapchat loses interest or goes out of business. Ads likely. Data mining likely.

Email is one of the very few services that is decentral and can absolutely not go away at the whim of one (or even many) corporations (it doesn't matter that users try to re-centralize it by essentially using just one mail service provider, if gmail goes down, Email doesn't give a shit).

Email is also reliable in a technical sense. The mail either gets delivered, or you get a bounce mail. Anything else is broken and misconfigured and gets you hate mail at postmaster@ very quickly. The pertinent specifications are very strict about this.
When people tell you your Email "probably got lost", you can be pretty sure they're lying in your face (or are too dumb to check their spam folder). Absolutely and every time ask your sysadmin about what's with the email.
In 99% of the cases the answer will be either "Yes, we accepted and delivered the mail", or "No, we haven't even seen a submission attempt".
Bonus: If an Email, according to your sysadmin, *did* get lost for whatever reason, you can yell at them for violating RFC2821 (or whatever's hip now) and they will likely understand your madness and apologize and fix the situation and be ashamed for a week If they don't, then you know for a fact they're incompetent.

Well, what was I gonna say? Right. Email works. Email is good. No, I'm not grandpa. In fact I'm one of the much-hated-here millenials who apparently use, but don't understand technology.

Anyway, Email is fine, mkay? There's the spam problem, but I consider that an acceptable cost for a decentral system.