2006 Email Usage Survey Overview

We completed our annual email usage survey last month and have been busy compiling the data. We received 250 responses from a variety of sources, including readers of The Office Letter, Office Evolution, The Unofficial Microsoft Weblog, Yahoo! Tech, Down the Avenue, and Paul Hammond. We gave out ClearContext discount coupons to all respondents who left their email addresses and a lucky 21 of those received a free license for IMS Pro. THANKS to all for help with the survey.

Questions on the 2006 survey were largely the same as our 2005 survey; focusing on  email usage habits, the tools used to access email, and the methods used to stay on top of it.   This year we also added an email overload questionnaire developed by Microsoft research to measure user’s feelings of email overload.

I’m going to post more detail over the week, but thought you might be interested in these facts that leapt out at me:

1. More of our respondents (largely email power users) are looking for ubiquitous access to their email.  Personal webmail usage increased from 34% to 61% and 42% reported accessing email from a mobile device (up from 29% last year).
2. The importance of email to the recipient appears to be increasing:

• Though we’re receiving the same email volume as we did last year, email users are spending more time than ever managing that email.  25% of our respondents say they spend 4 hours or more per day in email, up from 14% last year.
• Even though we’re spending more time managing the same email volume, our Inboxes  and mail files are growing in size.  Last year 51% said they keep 50 emails or less in the Inbox, this year that number is 39% while the percentage of people keeping 1000 or more messages in the Inbox almost doubled to 10%.

Watch for Part II, Email Volume…