Do you know which email client holds the largest market share? I thought that it was Gmail (I figured that Google is pretty much close to taking over the world). However, CampaignMonitor did a study on Email Client Popularity, and they found that Outlook 2000, 2003, and Express hold the largest portion of the market share for Email clients. What I found most surprising is that Gmail only had 5.51% of the market share!

Email Client Popularity (June 2009)

emailclientpopularity200906(Research and images from CampaignMonitor)

Anyhow, how does this relate to MeshTop? Well, its good news! This report supports our focus on creating MeshTop as a plug-in for Outlook. We desired to find a medium that would streamline Twitter and Facebook into the current work-flow that people already had, and our decision led us to launch our first release on Outlook 2007. The New York Times recently did a study on how American spend their days, and as shown in the graph below, a large portion of the day is spent at work – where Outlook is the predominant Email client utilized.

How American Spend Their Day – Reported By The New York Times

americansspendtime2008

(Research and images from the New York Times)

One interesting thing to note from the report  “Most popular email clients in June 2009”, is that market share for Outlook 2007 is only 7.55% and actually lags behind the older versions of Outlook 2000, 2003, and Express, which has a cumulative market share of 32.8%.

So why did we build our first release of MeshTop for Outlook 2007 instead of Outlook 2003? First off, we didn’t have this report. But also, we wanted to ensure that we were building for the latest builds of Microsoft products. Fortunately, we have already been working on making MeshTop backwards compatible, and will be releasing support for Outlook 2003 in the beginning of September 2009.

The next step would be for us to prepare for the next release of Microsoft Office products for Outlook 2010.

We’d love to hear feedback regarding which version of Outlook you are currently using?

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Email us at: hello@meshtop.com