Tony Finch – blog

Following a request from a colleague, I have compiled some statistics on email software used with our service. It's well over a year since the last time I did this. The numbers this time are generally larger because I analyzed a longer period of time. The main difference is the massive increase in the number of iOS users. The main WTF is where are all the Android users?

You need to be careful when interpreting these numbers. They come from User-Agent: and X-Mailer: headers in messages sent through our message submission service, smtp.hermes. It does not cover the parts of the University that have their own independent mail services. We aren't able to obtain stats from IMAP and POP connections, since there is no way for MUA software to provide a user agent string in that context, so we have to assume that there isn't a gross mismatch between software used to read and send email. Also, not all MUAs include a User-Agent: or X-Mailer: header, though the popular ones do.

The following data covers the dates 2011-07-29 - 2011-08-25 inclusive. In that period Hermes users sent 1430479 messages of which 1370145 (95.8%) included a user agent string. The total number of distinct users using the service is about 25,000. (Apart from xmas, August is our quietest time of year; we have over 30,000 users in term.) The numbers below count distinct users running each identified variety of software. The detailed per-version and per-OS breakdowns do not add up to the overall totals because some users use more than one version / OS.

users software

17391 Prayer (webmail.hermes)
 3868 Thunderbird
 3271 Apple Mail
 2454 Microsoft Outlook
 2131 iPhone / iPad / iPod
  465 Windows (Live) Mail / Outlook Express
  260 Mulberry
  236 Entourage / MacOutlook
  221 Eudora
  114 Evolution
   86 Pine / Alpine
   81 Android
   40 EPOC
   21 Opera
   19 KMail
   13 Mutt
   10 sparrow

Thunderbird breakdown

 1253 Thunderbird/6.0
 1815 Thunderbird/5.0
 1868 Thunderbird/3.1
  157 Thunderbird/3.0
  570 Thunderbird 2.0
   25 Eudora/3.0

 3099 Windows
  491 Macintosh
  468 Linux/X11

  510 Windows NT 6.1; WOW64;
  795 Windows NT 6.1;
   29 Windows NT 6.0; WOW64;
  310 Windows NT 6.0;
    1 Windows NT 5.2; WOW64;
    5 Windows NT 5.2;
 1433 Windows NT 5.1;
    4 Windows NT 5.0;

   39 Intel Mac OS X 10.7
  299 Intel Mac OS X 10.6
  101 Intel Mac OS X 10.5
   22 Intel Mac OS X 10.4
   18 PPC Mac OS X

Apple breakdown

  587 Apple Mail 5
 2048 Apple Mail 4
  802 Apple Mail 3

 1777 iPhone
  394 iPad
  117 iPod

Microsoft breakdown

 629 Outlook 14
1335 Office Outlook 12
 502 Office Outlook 11
  56 Office Outlook, Build 11
  56 Outlook, Build 10
  20 Outlook IMO, Build 9

 197 Outlook Express 6
  94 Windows Mail 6
 137 Windows Live Mail 15
  43 Windows Live Mail 14
   3 Windows Live Mail 12

  56 MacOutlook 14
 142 Entourage 12
  37 Entourage 11