ClearContext Corporate Blog

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…