How do people use email?

A couple of months back (March 8, 2010), I put a new poll on this web site – “How do you access email?”. The three simple choices were:

Web Browser
Email Program
Both

As most of you know, the two popular ways to check email are webmail and email clients (also known as email programs). So which is the preferred option?

How does the world use email? Webmail or email client

The results of the poll, however, tell a different story. Though the difference in the number of votes for the three options is not substantial, my assumption that webmail would come out at the top has gone down the drain. Surprisingly more people use an email client to access their messages.

How do people use their email accounts; via webmail or email clients?

	# votes *	% votes *
Webmail	1350	34.2
Email Program	1442	36.5
Both	1160	29.4

*The numbers will change over time and I will keep updating them monthly.

Obviously, there is an inherent danger in all kinds of data collection. In this case, we’ve not taken into consideration things such as the higher tendency (?) of email clients users to cast votes or the fact that this web site might be getting more people who use email clients instead of webmail! Anyway, the results are interesting and tell us that given a choice, more people would opt for downloading email to their computers via an email program… or was that another assumption of mine?

There is also a take home message for free email service providers such as Yahoo. If people prefer to use email programs for checking their message, the users of Gmail and Hotmail are in luck as POP access is available at no cost – refer links below for details. Yahoo, I suppose, might lose the race in the coming years if they don’t enabled POP access on their free accounts. FYI, a year back Hotmail started to provide free POP access.