More on the macOSXHints mail client poll
“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king”.
This saying is regrettably well-known to people like me who because they run a tech blog are regularly called upon by fellow workers (or worse, bosses) to fix interrupt conflicts on their PCs or discover why their Outlook 2000 Net Folders are not working properly.
It is also true of the recent macOSXhints poll data. The data is unsound in lots of ways, but in the absence of any other information, it’s the best we’ve got.
Hawk Wings reader Skid Kennedy, who is a retired engineer, kindly sent in an analysis of the two polls:
This makes some of the gains and losses easier to grasp. The big sleeper is GyazMail 
, a client to which I pay little attention because it doesn’t support IMAP. It saw a staggering 333% increase, rising from 23 users in the first poll to 181 in the second. Statisticians will rightly have their concerns, but this still seems like impressive growth over two years.
The AOL increase seems massively at odds with the anecdotal evidence, as Skid points out, and looks especially odd to me in a poll that I expect to be geek-heavy.
I am personally convinced (again largely by anecdotal evidence) that Thunderbird’s rise is due to the increased penetration of IMAP, Mail.app’s continued IMAP quirks and the similarity of interface that Thunderbird enjoys across platforms.
Tags: AOL, Apple Mail, email, GyazMail, imap, mail clients, mail.app, thunderbirdRelated posts
June 22nd, 2006 at 4:43 pm
There are however other subtle differences between the polls, such as the questions:
What email client to you use on your mac?
and
What is your prefered email client?
These happen to be quite different questions when you consider the volume of passing traffic, ie Windows or other (not mac) users who may answer the second of these questions, possibly distorting the AOL results, but would not have answered the first.
June 22nd, 2006 at 5:09 pm
While we do not use GyazMail in production on the Zone, I have to say it is an impressive little client: its Mail-like interface makes it extremely easy to grasp for most users but its use of orange and yellow make for a cheerier, more attractive ensemble.
Also, while it does not support IMAP, it is a very robust POP client, that can handle some seriously malformed messages without crashing or slowing down. In fact, I suspect most users see it as a “simpler Mail” (it has less account preferences to tweak) and use it as such.
FJ
June 23rd, 2006 at 3:34 am
These stats are all well and good, but they are misleading, as stats usually are.
If a program goes from one user to 10, oh my god, that is a nearly 1000% increase!!! But, it is still only nine new people. Hell, look at Gmail … and infinite growth!? Amaziiiiiiing. Not really, since they started at zero.
The important number to look at is growth based on actual users increased or decreased. And many of these apps have shown a nice gain. So lets keep the stats in perspective.
June 27th, 2006 at 2:31 am
The poll is irrelevant regarding the quality of the mail clients, Maczealots use anything with the Apple logo.