Email client popularity

With the addition of email client reports for all our customers, we took a step back and analyzed 6 months of data covering more than 300 million opens. The result - a birds eye view of email client popularity and usage trends over time.

To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest study on email client popularity ever undertaken. We'll be updating these figures each quarter or so to give you insight into the latest in email client usage. To learn more about how we measured usage and why some results may be skewed, check out the fine print.

Most popular email clients in June 2009

Below is the email client market share as of June 2009. These numbers are not exclusive - some people used more than one email client during the month, and so that will register a vote for each client used.

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32.08%
Outlook 2000, 2003, Express
15.65%
Yahoo! Mail
15.35%
Hotmail
7.55%
Outlook 2007
6.36%
Apple Mail 3
5.51%
Gmail
3.41%
iPhone 2.0
1.90%
Apple Mail 2
1.72%
Lotus Notes 6-7
1.66%
iPhone 3.0
Email client Popularity  
Microsoft Outlook 39.63%  
Outlook 2000, 2003, Express 32.08%  
Outlook 2007 7.55%  
Yahoo! Mail 15.65%  
Hotmail 15.35%  
Apple Mail 8.25%  
Apple Mail 3 6.36%  
Apple Mail 2 1.90%  
iPhone 5.78%  
iPhone 2.0 3.41%  
iPhone 3.0 1.66%  
iPod touch 2.0 0.59%  
iPod touch 3.0 0.08%  
iPhone 1.0 0.04%  
Gmail 5.51%  
AOL 2.76%  
AOL Desktop 9.1 1.39%  
AOL Mail 1.37%  
Lotus Notes 6 1.72%  
Thunderbird 2 1.12%  
Windows Live Desktop 0.71%  
Entourage 2004 0.12%  
Mobile Me 0.07%  
Excite 0.04%  
Undetectable 11.29%  

Trends over the last 6 months

Below is the total market share held by the 5 most popular email clients over the last 6 months. It's important to remember that email client usage is determined when an image is opened, so those clients that show images by default will be skewed slightly upwards.

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Email client Jan 09' Feb 09' Mar 09' Apr 09' May 09' Jun 09'
Outlook 2000, 2003, Express
 34.37% 33.04% 33.20% 33.09% 32.25% 32.08%
Yahoo! Mail
 15.68% 16.50% 15.19% 15.13% 16.24% 15.65%
Hotmail
 15.21% 15.99% 14.29% 15.05% 15.62% 15.35%
Outlook 2007
 5.98% 6.12% 6.62% 6.95% 6.96% 7.55%
Apple Mail 3
 5.67% 5.50% 5.77% 5.94% 6.09% 6.36%

Movers and shakers

The movers and shakers highlights those email clients whose market share is growing or shrinking the fastest. This is done by comparing the average usage for the last two months to the average from the two months prior. For example, if an email client goes from 5% market share in Dec/Jan to 10% market share in Feb/Mar, it would have grown by 100%.

iPod touch 3.0 8908.83%
iPhone 3.0 6423.32%
Excite 8.84%
Outlook 2007 6.98%
Windows Live Desktop 6.66%
iPhone 1.0 -23.47%
Entourage 2004 -6.75%
Apple Mail 2 -5.59%
AOL Mail -5.47%
iPhone 2.0 -5.35%

See which email clients your subscribers are using

While this report provides a great overview of which email clients are popular, it's probably not a good representation of your own subscribers. To find out exactly what your subscribers are using, you should check out our email client reports.

The fine print

The email client a person is using can only be detected if images are displayed. This can give an inflated weighting to email clients that display images by default, such as Outlook 2000 and the iPhone. It will also provide a lesser weighting to those that block images by default such as Gmail and Outlook 2007. Those email clients that aren't capable of displaying images, such as older Blackberry models and other mobile devices cannot be included in this study.