Re: email client popularity [was Webmail is implementation, not Internet architecture (was Re: Change the mailing list protocol, not DMARC.)]

[Eric Burger <[e-mail]>]

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.

On Jun 14, 2014, at 4:21 PM, [e-mail] wrote:

>> Ned,
> 
>> On 15/06/2014 02:42, [e-mail] 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
> 
>