WilsonWeb: E-Mail Client Programs

Grey-haired e-marketing guru and Christian evangelist minister Ralph Wilson surveyed 386 members of his online Bible study group as well as 457 readers of two of his e-business books on what email clients they used. Perhaps not entirely scientific (perhaps even divinely inspired, who knows), but an interesting snapshot nonetheless, and addressing a question marketers are always hungry for.

A few points of note:


Not surprisingly, Microsoft's Outlook (for business users, part of the client-server package with Exchange servers) and its free companion Outlook Express, dominate the market.

My own Eudora has virtually none of the consumer marketing (1%) but 11% of the business market (Go Eudora!)

More than 2/3 of the Bible's studies AOL users have upgraded to AOL 8.0.

After Outlook at Outlook Express, the next biggest category was "Other" — a mix of all the smaller email clients, including Compuserve, Entorage, Goldmine, Lotus, Mozilla, Pegasus, Pine, Squirrel Mail and more, which just goes to show what a mess the email client app space continues to be.

The web page, part of Ralph's latest email newsletter, goes into exhaustive detail into dozens of email client model versions, although as self-reported data you have to take these numbers with a grain of salt.