Noel's Muses

Today, I was sitting in my local car dealers Service Dept, knowing I had a couple hours to kill, I signed into their Guest WiFi network and logged into our CRM and did what I needed to, but I couldn't access Email, so I fired up Wireguard, and no go, WWW worked - I was just using it for past 40 minutes, other websites worked as well.

I then fired up other utilities to try different protocols, and quickly realised they are only allowing port 80 and 443, I thought to myself WTF, surely if you are going to offer a guest WiFi in your business, you'd at least allow Email as well as WWW, but this dealer here in North Lakes doesn't seem to think so, or they think that the only Email is Webmail.

It got me thinking, back in 2023 I ran a poll that produced rather surprising results and I wondered what, if anything, has changed since.

So here we are two years later, have people all gone back to one of the privacy invading webmail providers, my thoughts on them have not changed, they offer free Email  for a reason, to scan your messages, and target you with advertising, at the very least anyway.
 
Only request was if you use multiple options, select the method you use most, there is a slight change in how we asked the questions this time, with freemailers, previously they were all lumped into one pile, this time, we separated the two bigger players.

The Results!

From a total of 683 votes over the month of October 2025...

Coming in least used is your ISP or Own hosted Webmail with only 9 votes, or 2%

Other (non Microsoft or Google) Free Webmailers are next with 39 votes, or 7%

POP3 users have 44 votes, or 7% - a massive drop from previous 36%

Outlook/Live/Hotmail received 71 votes, or 12%

Gmail received 172 votes, or 27%

IMAP, the most popular used Email method with 308 votes, a whopping 48%, the same percentage as our last poll two years ago.

Although this reinforces the fact people still trust their ISP, WebHost, or personal Mail Server to handle their Emails over the likes of the big corporations that offer free Email services, denying organisations like Google and Microsoft the chance to pry on their Emails using them to gather a profile on you, which they all happily admit to doing. There are still some that are trusting those corporations a little more than previously, where these gains may have come from POP3 users which saw a massive reduction in use is a probability, of course we have no way of telling if everyone who participated in this poll also participated in the previous poll, so it's not exactly a scientific experiment in detecting swings, but it's a pretty good summation based on todays uses.