don't forget the OSX mail program -- which you could probably file under eudora. it seems to do fine with html, but then again, what do i know.

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Yeah, I was assuming that most people who upgraded to OSX would have continued using their previous mail reader, and not switched to Mail.app yet. But, Google Zeitgeist puts MacOS at 3% anyway, and I suspect more than half of the Mac users in the world are still running OS9.

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people in some univs/companies use their own clients which might or might not support. But I guess they would be included in the 1%.

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i guess i'm still a tad taken back that people want their email in html form since virii seem to take advantage of the html-ness.

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People want pretty. They don't know this "html" you speak of.

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For mailings to several lists, I use multipart, plain text and html, and I've never had a complaint.

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What lists do you mail to? I'll go complain :-P

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It will depend on who you're talking about. Home and SME users are - in general - going to use whatever came with the PC or ISP. So those figures are probably (sadly) roughly the right size.

Corporate users are - ditto - going to use whatever their IT people tell them. Which will be Outlook or Notes or... but not Hotmail or AOL etc.

And academic / geek etc users will use something better.

The answer to your opening question is 'no'.

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There's also Opera mail and its use is growing, as they make it better. Do not know whether they've considerably overgrown 1 percent, though (I use it at home!).

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My experience in companies that I deal with is:

80% - Outlook (Express)

19.9% - Lotus Notes, including rabidly out of date versions.

Everything else (even PINE can grok some HTML, and you can open the text/html part in your browser).

Why are you looking for these stats? Most *good* automated-responses/newsletters off either a text option or use multipart.

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Outlook or Outlook Express? Completely different codebase though both use mshtml.dll (Trident, the rendering engine for Internet Explorer) to display HTML e-mail.

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From a random sample of 1000 messages in a large mail spool (collected from several mailboxes), 590 of them had either a "X-Mailer" or a "User-Agent" header. Of these, 72.2% were either Outlook or Outlook Express. The second place goes to Eudora and something the identifies itself only as "3.1.76-XP/NG", with 3.2% each, followed closely by Mozilla with 2.7% and AOL with 2%. Everything else was under 1.5%. However, a larger sample could possibly give better results (but processing the strings to remove things like version info is a drag).

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Outlook / Outlook Express: 31%
Mutt: 20%
Mozilla: 16%
Eudora: 9%
Internet Mail Service (what's this?): 7%

Web clients (IMP, Squirrelmail, etc): 6%
Graphical Linux clients (KMail, Evolution): 3%
Other command line Unix clients (not mutt): 2%
Corporate clients (Lotus, Novell, etc) : 2%

Unknown or just generally marginal: 5%

Sample size: 470 emails with User-Agent/X-Mailer headers, from a mailbox of 719 emails

Of course, my own email is a skewed sample. I could run the figures over the mailboxes at work, I suppose, but it's still a Linux company so that would still be skewed. Perhaps if I ran the figures over my large collection of emails from non-technical mailing lists? Hrm.

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How many of those HTML capable clients allow users to turn off the HTML? Not that I've spent a lot of time researching it, but I couldn't find a way to tell Outlook (standard at work) to force presentation as plain text. I do, however, generally convert all email to plain text only when I reply - breaking the HTML chain. And I set it to only send new email as plain text. Though I've received some flak about not 'color coding' my replies. Ugh....

Even terminal clients like mutt (what I use for my personal email) can handle HTML with a helper, I have mine configured to use links, which works rather well. But I only did that because of a few companies I deal with that insist on sending HTML formatted email and don't do multipart. I've whitelisted a handful of HTML senders, but everyone else runs into my procmail 'text/html' MIME filter that sends back an auto-reply telling them that if they want to reach me they'll need to send plain text.

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Here's me dying of non-shock that saying

(Please note! This is not an invitation for you to tell me that you use /bin/mail in an 80x24 terminal emulator. I'm looking for numbers, not a survey of the personal preferences of power-nerds.)

didn't do any good.

I think it's swell that you whitelist your friends, I really do.

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I used to work at a marketing company that, among other things, did pseudo-spam newsletters to clients' pre-existing customers.

Your wild guesses are pretty accurate, at least from the numbers I remember from 3 years ago. I used to do compatibility tests of various levels of HTML whiz-bangedness. This is what I recall from those days:

* Up until like AOL 8 (or 7, whatever was the latest version 3 years ago), the HTML support was CRAP. You're basically limited to bold, italic, underline, and font colors/sizes. Now, the latest version of the client wasn't too bad, and the webmail client was pretty good, but still, a lot of people were using old-ass AOL clients. Fortunately, AOL users are easy to identify (what with that @aol.com and everything), so there were 3 templates: text, html, and aol (very basic html, no multipart/alternative block).
* Yahoo's webmail client would only display HTML if the text/html part was the first part of the multipart/alternative block. Some no-name webmail client would only work if text/html was the LAST part of multipart/alternative. Guess which layout we went with.
* Yeah, Eudora has crappy HTML support. This is us caring...
* Despite its reputation, outlook actually worked very well with regard to HTML display. It would handle nearly anything you threw at it.
* On a sidenote, nearly all of the webmail clients' mime-handling capabilities are SHIT, which led me to release kmMail upon the world. (I swear, one of these days I'll release an updated version.)

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My university and the universities of almost all of my friends use IMP Webmail. Although we're encouraged to use Pine or Outlook or OS X Mail, everybody tends to use IMP when they're on a friend's computer, at the library, etc. IMP, or at least the implementation used by my university, has no HTML support. URL's are automagically converted to links.

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This may be what you're looking for - June 2002 though: http://www.emaillabs.com/article_emailpercentages.html

Not surprisingly email marketers seem very interested in which clients are being used - more stats: http://www.clickz.com/emailstrategies/tech/article.php/1428551

Of course, these are self-selecting data sets.

And here - http://www.emaillabs.com/resources_statistics.html#emailformat - they refer to client statistics collected from Jupiter Research, so that may be another place to look.

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Cool. The "clickz" one sounds sensible, though their sample size is fairly small and biased.

The "emaillabs" one has a pie-chart on that page demonstrating that AOL and Netscape Communicator are tied at 3% each -- so I think it's safe to assume that their numbers are complete nonsense (even for 2002.)

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Here's a survey on a rather terrifying “web marketing” site. They took two sets of data, one representing business use, one representing casual use (they interviewed a Bible study group of all things for the latter set). Their conclusions more are less in line with yours (AOL did worse, the various sundry webmail services and “everything else” did rather better), thus proving that the scientific method is unnecessary.

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I don't know how many of the Linux clients support HTML email, but that's one thing to consider.

Also, some mail services have actually started blocking HTML email, not intentionally, but because it sometimes contains signatures that make it look suspicious. For example, HTML mail from livejournal through my POP server at softhome.net is almost 100% blocked -- I never see it.

So, it's more than just a client thang. Every link in the chain could have some effect.

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Pretty much all of the mail clients that people actually use on Linux support html mail at this point -- either internally, or as pine does with /usr/bin/htmlview .

At the same time, I haven't seen any recent data which suggests that Linux users even make up a statistically significant chunk of email users at this point in time. After all, Linux is a mere 1% on the google zeitgeist, and I have to assume that google users and email users corelate relatively closely.

I do have data to support the statement above regarding which mail clients people actually use (or, rather, which ones they install), but only for one fairly popular distro. But I don't think I can make the raw numbers available, due to our terms when collecting the data.

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i've never seen an html email that eudora couldn't display properly.. you just have to make sure you tell it to use IE internally for html emails instead of whatever its own thing is.

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I use a hybrid system that relays my mail through a series of electrodes hooked up to a tiny Scottish man with semaphore flags.

His HTML support is absolute shite. It's hella l33t though.

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Why do you want to know? Just curious.

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Use calypso (your 1%). It might grok html, but i turned that off. turns urls into clickable links, tho, if that's what you need.

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To the tune of:
Abney Park - Kine


Look at all of the e-mails
Move down, move up
I'm gonna check my email
Log on, bring it up

This is where I e-mail myself
and I show that I'm not blind
I haven't learned Mutt yet so
I'm still using Pine

Still a console geek
and Elm just stinks
Still a console geek
and Elm just stinks

No fear the Lovesan worm
No gifs, no pr0n
No fear the Lovesan worm
No gifs, no pr0n
[repeat etc]

---

Can't help you with numbers, but given the aghast gaping-mawed reaction of mailing list users whose worldview has just been destroyed by telling them that there are people who can't read HTML mail, I'd presume that there are very few still in that position. That those few of us are loudmouthed jackasses who will never stop complaining at you is probably reason enough to send in text unless you want to do something special.

Of course, if somebody really truly wants to read the email but their client doesn't support HTML, they can save the message to a file and open it in a browser.

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I would probably include Pegasus in the Eudora/Netscape category as well.

Likewise while I use Eudora and it indeed has very shitty HTML (it tries to read links from text and thus screws up if someone actually puts it down using tags) it also lacks the ability to turn it off. I've thought about switching to Thunderbird, but I don't care for how it handles the actual display of messages and don't like preview windows. Likewise the newsreader isn't to my liking compared to Agent. I'm not certain whether it allows the removal of HTML either.

There are some pretty good reasons to turn off HTML e-mail. For one the majority of what's being sent relies on the transmission of text and text alone and it's not likely to change anytime soon. Likewise HTML e-mail is not very well implemented at the present as you mention and thus is more likely to come out looking shitty regardless of whether you're one of the select few that use it appropriately. It also simply bloats the download and not for any useful reason, but so I can get e-mail that someone sends in magenta text on a purple background in some excessive font. The green on black layout here is readable and looks good, but sadly most people (as shown by AIM/ICQ and such) do not have that same ability and feel that they must blind the user to express themself. Though very dark blue that looks almost black, but not quite black enough is highly irritating.

The questions thus isn't so much will people be able to read it, but do they want to? I doubt it will ever come to pass that it is a useful and valuable feature.

Anyhow, I'm shocked that that many people use AOL or webmail. The Outlook I can see though. Damn, I remember not that long ago when almost everyone used Eudora on Windows. The switch to Outlook seemingly came overnight.

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For both UseNet and mail. I love it - but it doesn't do HTML. I don't consider it a loss. At work, I use Outlook, but I send as plain text and I get virtually no HTML e-mails.

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Despite the fact that your post is about feature availability and mail reader popularity, and despite your specific plea not to be inundated with messages about personal preferences, I would like to tell you that I use [insert crippled, minority MUA here].

[Insert useless information about minority MUA's HTML abilities here].

It being my personal preference, I find that I like it pretty well, even though [insert breathtaking lossage here]. Your insinuation that I am part of an insignificant minority [choose one: offends me; brings me great joy; has not yet occurred to me]!

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I want to have your babies.

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I use Eudora and it does HTML pretty well. I like text-only better, though.

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I also use Eudora, but I've got it set to "text only" because most HTML emails just bug me.

-case

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I've installed filters in MUTT to deal with HTML, I get so much HTML mail from legitimate sources that it's the only way to deal with my email.

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