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Comment by tornadoboy55 | Hacker News Reader

> However, it's probably no exaggeration to say that most users haven't used a desktop email client in over a decade.

Almost everyone that uses macOS uses Apple Mail. Actually, I prefer that from having to (keep ) open a tab for Gmail.

And on windows 10, I now use the built-in Mail app, which is almost there for home/casual use (except notably that we still can't right-click on a file and Send to Mail. Really, Microsoft!?).

I usually open the browser for better searching, such as email and google talk logs with a certain person, and somehow I doubt a third-party will implement that feature as well as gmail does.

I wonder if there are actual statistics about this. I only know one person who uses Apple Mail.

I don't think it's something that anyone's tried to quantify, no. I know a few people who use Apple Mail, though, including people who are pretty technically savvy. I don't (in my last job I used MailPlane, and at home I was using Postbox but recently switched to Spark), but my impression is that for many people Mail is in the "good enough" category.

If you run a mailing list on Mailchimp, it provides stats on the email clients that subscribers are using, presumably detected from the User-Agent that HTML email clients send when downloading images.

My tiny email list (at indieconference.com) has 8% of my subscribers using Apple Mail, and 75% still use desktop/laptop for checking email.

Email Client Marketshare also shows Apple Mail with 7% marketshare as of 1 January 2017: https://emailclientmarketshare.com/

My tiny email list (at indieconference.com) has 8% of my subscribers using Apple Mail, and 75% still use desktop/laptop for checking email.

Does this breakdown take into account the OS? Is that 8% of macOS subscribers running Apple Mail, or of all subscribers? I'm unfamiliar with what data you have avialable, so I'm not sure if this is even possible.

Thanks for the link to emailclientmarketshare.com. As you noted, Apple Mail is at 8%. The Apple iPhone figure is pretty amazing, at 33%!

Oh, I meant 8% of all subscribers use Apple Mail. It isn't 8% of macOS users, but 8% of any device. So the percentage of Mac users with Apple Mail would be higher than 8%.

You could try calculating something similar with the Email Client Marketshare figures: remove all the iPhone / iPad / Android / Windows clients and calculate from what's left. If I do that I estimate 15 - 20% of macOS folks using Apple Mail, with the rest mostly using Gmail.

That's what I suspected. Thanks for confirming!

> remove all the iPhone / iPad / Android / Windows clients and calculate from what's left

Does it say anywhere if "Gmail" refers to only the web app, or if that includes the native apps for iOS and Android?

Edit: This blog post explains the grouping. All native email clients on the iPhone count as "iPhone", not just Apple Mail.

https://litmus.com/blog/mobile-holds-at-56-for-october-email...

I even use Postbox

I also use Postbox, it'll take quite a lot to get me away from it.

I love Postbox as a mail client but the lack of calendar integration with meeting invitation support is a deal breaker for my work with corporate clients. I got by with the Lightning plug in for a while but it looks like they've discontinued it. I'm planning on moving back to outlook, sadly.

In my corporation people usually use Outlook.

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