> Ned, > On 15/06/2014 02:42, ned+ietf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote: > ... > > Some data to support this conclusion: > [that webmail is not dominant] > > > > http://emailclientmarketshare.com/ > Hmm. I was curious about what those numbers really measure. > Judging by http://litmus.com/email-analytics, it seems that > they refer to a sample of emails that (a) contained a specific > HTML snippet and were (b) opened as HTML by the clients and > (c) by implication, had been sent via a mailing list. Litmus is a service for people who send out bulk mail and want to track whether or not it's seen, and when it's seen what client is used to see it. > It seems > very likely to me that the sample consisted of spam. Actually, it's unlikely in the extreme. Spammers are into volume, they don't care about tracking analytics and aren't going to pay a company like Litmus to perform such a service. But there are a hell of a lot of legitimate bulk email senders out there who do care about the effectiveness of their mail, and have the money to pay for such things. > I'm > not sure that the numbers reflect unbiased statistics, unless > you're a spammer. In any case they don't indicate how many > people open email in plain text mode (which I alway do if > possible, precisely to avoid embedded code). Well, I think it's up to you to show that a significant fraction of the email-reading public prefers to read HTML mail without resolving any of the links, and that missing out on that fraction significantly biases such data. > That said, they certainly show that one size doesn't fit all. Which was the main point. Ned