Noel's Muses

After running the How do you primarily use Email poll for about 10 weeks, and with very few votes coming in over the past 4 weeks, it's time to close it out.

I would have thought the freemailers - Office365/Outlook and Gmail etc would have had greater usage, the results below possibly don't reflect accurately that in so far as the local ISP and Hosting Email users possibly also use Gmail or Outlook, but we did ask for primary usage, not for crossover usage.

With 889 (yes I know, I should have let it run a few more days to get nice rounded figures, but... meh...) votes in total, coming in with the least used method was ISP/Hosted Webmail, with only 9% or 73 votes - that surprised me, pretty high number for those only using Webmail, especially given the cheapness of smart phones with just about every man, woman, child and dog having one.

In third place was the freemailers - Outlook, Office365, gmail etc with 10% or 85 votes - again, that surprised me, I would have thought that number would be much higher, a lot of people must just have freemail throw away accounts for the spammy things like newsletters and mailing lists, reserving their private accounts for more important and personal Emails, or the likes of google highly inflate their gmail userbase numbers, and well, I guess not everyone entrusts their mail to the prying eyes of the U.S. govts NSA or google's email-scanners for targeted spam.

In second place with 36% or 312 votes, is the more traditional POP3/POP3s method, despite most people having mobile devices along with desktops/laptops, many of you still prefer the privacy of downloading your Email, in past decade or so more service providers started offering IMAP for the convenience it gives, yet POP3 usage only very slowly dwindled away, Edward Snowden's big reveals sure seemed to have helped POP3 with its download from server privacy advantage stick around in popularity for longer.

Bringing us to the number one most common method people use to access their email in 2023 - IMAP/IMAPs, romping in with 48% or 419 votes, proving once again IMAP's advantage of accessing your Email anywhere at any time on any device.

It also shows way more people trust their local ISP for Email, withdrawing from U.S. based freemailers.


To all who voted - THANK YOU!

Remember... always use the "s" variant of the protocol - POP3s , IMAPs, SMTPs, these use TLS and give you the best encryption from you to the Mail Server, this is especially essential when using public WiFi Hot Spots.