Email Client Popularity for 2009

The below data is from the result of analyzing email client usage of more than 300 million people since the start of the year. Here's a quick summary of the 10 most popular email clients as of June 2009.

iPhone now more popular than Gmail

It continues to blow us away just how quickly the iPhone is moving mobile email forward. The iPhone now caters for 5.78% of the email client market, breezing past Gmail to become the 5th most popular email client in the world. Put another way, iPhone now has more of the email client market than AOL, Lotus Notes, Thunderbird and Entourage combined. That's pretty incredible considering it's a mobile device and a relative newcomer compared to the rest of the market. Thanks to their software update approach within iTunes, iPhone users are also prolific updaters. iPhone OS 1.0 and 2.0 are amongst the fastest shrinking email clients, while iPhone OS 3.0 is by far the fastest growing email client version on the market. It's also worth noting that this report looks at which email clients are being used to render an email, not necessarily what service powers that email address and should be noted the Gmail figures don't take into account those Gmail users viewing their email in another email client using POP or IMAP access. I regularly check my Gmail account via my phone and Outlook, and I'm clearly not alone.

Webmail providers stagnant

It's a safe assumption that more and more people would be moving from traditional desktop email clients to web-based email clients. While it's certainly clear many of us are shifting to reading our emails on a mobile device, the same can't be said for web-based email clients. The market share for both Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail has more or less plateaued over the last six months.

Yahoo! Mail share has fallen slightly by 0.03% since January, and Hotmail's has grown a mere 0.14%. Gmail has grown 0.09% in the same period.

Outlook market share is shrinking

While Outlook 2007 holds its spot as the fourth fastest growing email client on the market, older versions are declining at a faster rate. Over the last 6 months, Outlook 2007 has taken an additional 1.57% of the market. In the same time frame, Outlook 2000 and 2003 have given up 2.28% of the market, making an overall loss of 0.71%. For many reasons, it will be very interesting to watch how fast Outlook 2010 is adopted when it's released to the public some time next year. As always, these numbers are interesting guides on where your email design priorities lay, but we still see huge variations in usage from list to list.

Our Recommendations

We recommend that all email templates old and new are regularly tested on all email clients to ensure their compatibility.
Also regularly check your deployment reports to see which email client is most popular for your campaigns as this can vary slightly depending on your customers and use this information to target your customers more effectively.