Email client poll: The winners and losers
Ever wondered about the breakdown of email clients among Mac users or which clients are gaining and losing ground?
I have. And now we know. At least, we know what email clients are preferred by 7,750 macOSXHints users.
In May 2004, macOSXHints held a poll 
asking readers about their favourite email client. 4,251 readers voted and the results looked like this:
Last week, macOSXHints asked the same question and this time 7,750 people voted:
A number of clients, for example Mailsmith and PowerMail, hardly moved at all.
Mail.app and Entourage are the biggest losers. Even if you take the view that Entourage users are under-represented on macOSXHints, the decline is surprising. Mail.app dropped a raw 7%, almost 10% of its 2004 user base.
Gmail and Thunderbird are the winners. There is enough anecdotal evidence on Hawk Wings alone to make Gmail’s rise expected, but I was a little taken aback by the rise and rise of Thunderbird.
Looking at these results, what surprises you?
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Tags: Apple Mail, email, email client breakdown, email clients, entourage, GMAIL, mail.app, thunderbird
June 20th, 2006 at 12:54 am
I’m on the same page as Mark Twain here… “…lies, damned lies, and statistics.” This is interesting but meaningless (in any direction). The only thing I would take away from this is that the overall quality and variety of email tools has improved and people are using them, to some degree. I don’t think anyone would be surprised by these numbers and I find the two sets of numbers remarkably similar, rather than remarkably different.
June 20th, 2006 at 1:05 am
I know this is a cliche, but these are not scientific polls. I think it’s really hard to draw conclusions from these “data.”
June 20th, 2006 at 1:10 am
Let’s see: The default email program declines a bit, but there are no clear winners in alternatives. GMail online adware and unstable (on Mac) Thunderbird are maybes, but haven’t really nailed it yet.
What this tells me is that people are still looking for SOME kind of decent email client out there, but they still haven’t found it. Mail has big room for improvement, but benefits from how weak the alternatives are. (I’ve tried a ton of them, and they go from yuck to s@#!*^%!!
June 20th, 2006 at 1:53 am
This is interesting data, that should not be discounted so quickly as “not scientific” may be a simple poll, but it is still a poll the nation polls that CNN takes for instance are of a sample of 1,200 people. Both of these are far larger than that, for a far smaller population.
What should be noted, is that Gmail’s rise is in part due to the fact that you set it up on the Web first, and then if you want to gain POP access you have to dive into the settings to change this. It is not automatically on, because they want you to use the web client.
Thunderbird is likely gaining ground because people are unhappy with Mail and how it works (most likely on the IMAP front).
Just my thoughts atleast.
June 20th, 2006 at 2:13 am
These are not interesting data, or at least the relatively small changes are not interesting.
It’s not simply about sample size. It’s about a poll based completely upon people volunteering for it. CNN’s polls (that is, the ones that involve phone calls) actually go out and POLL a random set of people. And it’s true (via the Chebyshev inequality) that polling 1000 people can give you very tight certainty bounds on several million people (due to a squaring effect), but that’s based on the assumption that you’re polling a random set of people.
And most importantly, these sort of voluntary polls are attractive to one particular audience that may or may not be representative of the population as a whole.
Additionally, there’s no way to know how stable this poll is. If you ran the same poll again next week, you might see 3% variations in each of the major players.
You simply can say nothing qualitative about the relatively small quantitative shifts in these data.
June 20th, 2006 at 2:19 am
My point was not meant to be read that the small changes are significant and should be looked at harder, but rather that the data should not be immediately dismissed. My main point being not that certain ones were losing ground and others gaining, but that Gmail on the web is a player in the overall scheme of Mac OS X users.
If you really want to get in to the irrelevance of the changes in the numbers you need only look at the two very different sample sizes.
June 20th, 2006 at 3:57 am
I definitely prefer Eudora. It may look a little “System-9-ish” (ok, a LOT), but it does a professional job.
Gmail has this cute search facility but it is impossible to order emails by person unless you can keep the subject the same.
Mail looks too cutsie for me and (while I haven’t used it in about 2 yrs) was not as functional as Eudora.
So for me it is Eudora Eudora Eudora
June 20th, 2006 at 4:43 am
I would consider myself a hardcore mac user, but mail.app has driven me almost over the edge of switching to windows.
I somehow managed to import my data from mail 1 ( 10.3.9), but importing under tiger from mail 2 always fails. Imagine a piece of software that is unable to import/read its own data.
the last system update broke smtp somehow, so I went to gyaz mail. happy so far. mail.app? never again, so its more amazing for me that still so many mac users are using it.
June 20th, 2006 at 5:25 am
I must live on fantasy island because Mail.app is great for me. I read multiple IMAP accounts (all over SSL) for both work and home and Mail has the best comination of features I’ve found. It doesn’t have everything, but what it does have works consistently and is devoid of the jagged edges found in everything else (Thunderbird being its primary competitor in my book). My inbox (unified) usually has 3000-8000 messages in it and I do quite a bit of email on a daily basis. The only caveat to this is that I don’t really use folders because they make me spend my time organizing mail instead of letting spotlight do its thing.
One of the most important features to me is the ability to turn HTML email off. I hate HTML email (evil evil evil), and Mail.app is so far the only well-integrated GUI mail app I’ve used that actually supports turning HTML email off (via hidden preference). Thunderbird can’t do it (which is infuriating because customization is about all it has going for it). Mail.app always (and I mean ALWAYS) displays mail in my chosen monospace font and size.
I’ve been a finicky emailer for a really long time (elm, anyone?) and I think I’ve used every GUI and non-GUI email client for Unix available since 1993 or so… Mail.app is the best client on any platform that I’ve used, for what I do. I certainly wouldn’t “switch to Windows” over a mail app (as if switching operating systems would fix it, and as if Windows has any really good mail clients either)… that would be like cutting my head off because my nose hurts.
June 20th, 2006 at 7:41 am
@Jeremy: I completely agree with you about Mail’s usability and smooth edges. I love it too.
But it is interesting that lots of other people in the two polls don’t seem to share the love. I wonder what makes them switch?
June 20th, 2006 at 11:56 am
Mail’s the most usable and smooth OS X MUA for me, too. But too many issues still keep me from “loving” it, especially with its potential for randomly losing messages (which fortunately I have noticed happen for awhile, though that doesn’t mean it hasn’t).
Gmail wasn’t on the first mail client poll and just its popularity has surely had a significant influence on switchers from Mail. Some switchers to Thunderbird may have been influenced by their preference for Firefox and its increased popularity, too. The second poll has almost double the number of respondents, without knowing how many participated in the original one. And the percentages seem simultaneously predictable and meaningless to me.
Mac OS X Hints visitors represent a more technically inclined and/or curious segment of the Apple/Mac community. It’s usually easy to see how that heavy bias influences polls there, which are a harmless (even silly) indicator of relatively little or no significance.
June 20th, 2006 at 12:16 pm
4,251 readers voted in the first poll and 7,750 in the second.
I don’t understand why people think that the figures are “meaningless”. Stastically unsound to some degree, yes. Skewed a bit, yes. But meaningless?
Why is this not an accurate breakdown of macOSXHints readers who happen by in the week of the poll, are prepared to participate in polls and willing to press a radio button?
Is there some other statistical factor that I am overlooking?
June 20th, 2006 at 12:53 pm
I never said that the figures are “meaningless.” I said that differences of this magnitude are meaningless.
Tiem and time again it has been shown that polls conducted through a volunteer method like this have little probability of representing an entire population. That is, these results have little chance of matching an actual scientific sample of macOSXHints readers let alone Mac users as a whole. The people who decide to take such a poll are not a representative sample of any population. This is exactly what happened with “Dewey WIns!” People who had telephones simply were not a good representative sample of a population. People who volunteer for polls are even worse. You skew your sampling.
That’s why these on-line polls are nothing more than eye candy. It’s not that they’re meaningless… They can be interesting, but at a purely abstract level. There’s nothing concrete that can be said about them. There is ABSOLUTELY NO THEORY that exists to explain polls taken in this manner.
Here’s an example of what I mean about stability. You can get heavy tailed/free-scale like race conditions with these polls. Let’s say that someone views your site, and you’re showing the stats half-way through the week. Someone sees that Thunderbird isn’t doing so well. They would have never read macOSXhints, but they want to stick up for Thunderbird, so they go to the site. Their vote is dependent upon the votes before them. The statistics that you are using to draw your conclusions make the assumption that each vote is indepedent of every other vote.
And so, depending on timing and initial conditions and lots of other things, if you re-ran this poll today and then next week and then next week you may get completely different distributions. You simply cannot simply assume that these are stable results. We know NOTHING about the convergence properties of polls taken this way.
So when you see a 3% or 5% difference from a poll taken last year… I don’t that shows convincing evidence of anything. I think it just does exactly what these polls are meant to do — make readers feel warm and fuzzy.
June 21st, 2006 at 9:45 am
I was using meaningless as a contradiction to any idea of them meaning more or different things than they actually do.
The For Entertainment Purposes Only disclaimer seems well-fitting for polls with aforementioned kinds of biases and other dubious conditions.
Wrapping up this silliness by answering Tim’s original question:
Nothing really, about the results. Any surprise is the “serious” amount of attention such a mundane, unserious poll has generated here. :-)
June 21st, 2006 at 9:52 am
Touché! ;-)
June 22nd, 2006 at 1:29 am
I think the reason that Thunderbird has gained a lot is two-pronged:
1. It’s the most user-friendly and compatible IMAP client of the modern apps, and IMAP is gaining traction with a lot of ISPs and universities.
2. Its interface is consistent between Mac OS, Windows and Linux – a big plus for folks who use email at work and home and don’t want to deal with two different interfaces.
And the Thunderbird crew is really quick at squashing bugs, which is a big plus. My employer uses Thunderbird as its default email client (IMAP mail, Macs and PCs throughout our office), and while we support other clients (e.g. Entourage, Eudora, Outlook), Thunderbird is the best app for IMAP: consistent behavior and interface, etc.
At home, where most of my accounts are POP3, I use Mail.app.
June 22nd, 2006 at 7:03 am
I’m still waiting the initial (or beta) release of “Kiwi”. In the mean time, my email client program of choice is Apple’s mail.app. On the PC/Windows side of the house, “IncrediMail” did it for me. The problem is, IncrediMail is exclusively written for Windows :(. If there were a Mac version of IncrediMail available, I’d be in email client program heaven ~ sigh. I will continue to hope and search for ‘thee’ email client program that does it for me and my iBook, while using Mail.app in the mean time.