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Breakdown of Web-Based Email Clients

Tuesday, December 12th, 2006  |  Tom Carmony

A number of posts have been floating around the email marketing blogosphere earlier today, detailing the latest demographic reports and trends on the email marketing front, particularly use of web-based email providers such as Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail and others.

For those unfamiliar with the pitfalls of designing HTML-based marketing emails, web-based services like Hotmail and Gmail are often the bane of many a designer’s existence. Their often difficult handling of CSS styling and other contemporary coding techniques leads (in many cases) to HTML-coded “mash-ups” of sorts, as the designer is left to work his or her way through a variety of hacks and other work-arounds in order to insure that the design of the email appears to the end user as close as possible to the way it was intended to look when originally designed.

One particularly interesting note is that perpetually Beta Gmail (are they ever going to lift the “Beta” tag from that service?) only ranks fourth among web-based email services, despite probably getting a majority of the press since it’s initial release.

So what beat out, Gmail, you ask? Well, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, and…. drumroll please…. MySpace!

States EmailMarketingReports.com:

“As of November, 2006, the most popular email websites (based on US Internet usage and in descending order of popularity) were: mail.yahoo.com, mail.myspace.com and hotmail.com.”

While MySpace has clearly become the 800-pound gorilla of the social networking circles, one might not initially consider them in the context of web-based email providers. Of course, considering their 70 million + user base, perhaps we shouldn’t be so surprised after all.

Click here for the full rundown of the latest numbers on email usage »

 
 

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