Top 10 Email Clients
| Email Client | Market Share |
Outlook
Outlook 2003
Outlook 2007 | 43%
34%
9% |
| Hotmail | 17% |
| Yahoo! Mail | 13% |
| GMail | 5% |
| Apple Mail | 4% |
| iPhone | 4% |
| Thunderbird | 2.4% |
| Windows Live Mail (Desktop) | 2% |
| AOL Mail | 1.2% |
| Lotus Notes | 0.4% |
| Others | 8% |
Data collected from 250,000,000 email recipients using the Fingerprint analysis tool. This chart shows the top 10 email clients by market share. Compiled 24 February 2010 by
fingerprintapp.com.
The chart to the left shows the top 10 email clients as of February 2010. The majority of users are reading emails with Outlook. Following close behind are web-based email accounts like Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail and GMail making up 35% of email clients.
The chart is shown to emphasize the fact that most users (mostly businesses) are still viewing emails using Outlook. When you're designing your html emails you'll need to make sure they're displaying properly in Outlook.
There are a few (actually more than a few) things in Outlook 2007 that are no longer supported (for security reasons or Word 2007 doesn't support it.) Since most businesses have yet to upgrade to Outlook 2007 they might not be aware of this.
From the Microsoft.com website: "Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 uses the HTML parsing and rendering engine from Microsoft Office Word 2007 to display HTML message bodies. The same HTML and cascading style sheets (CSS) support available in Word 2007 is available in Outlook 2007."
Here's a short list of things you'll need to avoid when composing html emails:
Word 2007 / Outlook 2007 does not support:
Unsupported HTML Attributes Compared with the HTML 4.01 Specification
- applet
- bdo
- button
- form
- iframe
- input
- isindex
- menu
- noframes
- noscript
- object
- optgroup
- option
- param
- q
- script
- select
The key items above that are not supported are forms, scripts, javascript, java, flash, and iframes.
Unsupported Cascading Style Sheet Properties Compared with Cascading Style Sheets, Level 2.1
- azimuth
- background-attachment
- background-image
- background-position
- background-repeat
- border-spacing
- bottom
- caption-side
- clear
- clip
- content
- counter-increment
- counter-reset
- cue-before, cue-after, cue
- cursor
- display
- elevation
- empty-cells
- float
- font-size-adjust
- font-stretch
- left
- line-break
- list-style-image
- list-style-position
- marker-offset
- max-height
- max-width
- min-height
- min-width
- orphans
- outline
- outline-color
- outline-style
- outline-width
- overflow
- overflow-x
- overflow-y
- pause-before, pause-after, pause
- pitch
- pitch-range
- play-during
- position
- quotes
- richness
- right
- speak
- speak-header
- speak-numeral
- speak-punctuation
- speech-rate
- stress
- table-layout
- text-shadow
- text-transform
- top
- unicode-bidi
- visibility
- voice-family
- volume
- widows
- word-spacing
- z-index
Other Unsupported Web-Related Features
The following is a list of all other Web-related features that Word 2007 does not support:
- Animated GIF images. Only a static representation of the GIF image shows.
- Flash. Only a red "X" shows in the area where the flash would display.
So when composing html emails it's back to the basic table based layout since css float is no longer supported. Also avoid using background images (you can only have a background image for the body tag), flash, javascript, java and animated gifs. Here's the entire list of what is and is not support in Outlook 2007:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338201.aspx.