What's the point? [LWN.net]

What's the point?

Posted Mar 1, 2012 22:19 UTC (Thu) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841)
In reply to: What's the point? by kripkenstein
Parent article: Mozilla announces HTML5-based phone

For example, we all used to use native mail apps once upon a time. Today, most of us use HTML5 webmail.

I'm curious if you have any pointers to data that supports this claim. You may well be right, but I would be a bit surprised. Around here (University environment) nearly everyone uses either a university- or gmail- based mail service. But they use native-mail-app-of-choice via IMAP or Exchange, not a web interface. Or maybe you were only thinking of smart phone Email access?

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What's the point?

Posted Mar 1, 2012 22:31 UTC (Thu) by kripkenstein (subscriber, #43281) [Link]

Well, data is hard to come by, if someone uses "gmail" then I assume they are using the webmail interface, but they can be using it through IMAP and a standalone client. Likewise if someone uses "outlook" then it might be the native client, or it could be the outlook HTML interface.

Personally, I don't think I know anyone that *doesn't* use gmail with it's web interface. The exceptions are yahoo and hotmail, also with their web interfaces.

Best data I can find is that gmail, hotmail and yahoo mail each have >300M users [1]. It's harder to measure usage of native email clients.

http://www.email-marketing-reports.com/metrics/email-stat...