世論 What Japan Thinks

japan.internet.com released a short survey, carried out at the start of February in conjunction with goo Research to find out about how people use web mail services. This is the tenth time they have performed this survey, once every month since May 2005. 1,090 people, 46.8% male, from up and down the country completed the internet-based questionnaire. 2.1% were teenagers, 22.5% were in their twenties, 40.6% were in their thirties, 24.3% were in their forties, 7.4% in their fifties, and just 3.0% aged sixty or over.

Given that according to another survey, one in five Japanese has tried dating sites, I find that only 2% have used a web mail address for this purpose suprising. Perhaps the rest used their mobile phones or an alternative form of aliasing; my main provider, for instance, offers up to five aliases, selectable from not just standard @isp.ne.jp, but vanity ones like @teabreak.jp. Or perhaps people just lied more here!

Note that when the provider usage statistics below are compared to an earlier survey on brand image, goo performs better here than its brand image suggests, and Hotmail worse.

First, they found that 915 people in the sample, or 83.9%, used web mail services, up 3.3% from the previous survey. This time, the thing people were most satisfied with regarding web mail was the easy on the eyes nature of the display, with almost seven in ten indicating their satisfaction. The previous survey found mailbox size was the most satisfying feature last month.

Looking at what web mail services people used, top was Yahoo! mail at 66.4%, goo mail at 31.4%, then Hotmail at 30.7%. When asked to select the one service they used the most, Yahoo! kept the top spot with 52.1%, Hotmail moved up (or didn’t drop quite so much, depending on how you look at it!) to second with just 13.6%, then goo mail on 10.8%.

Q1: How often do you use web mail? (Sample size=915)

Every day	65.9%
Three to five times per week	12.7%
One or two times per week	11.3%
One or two times per month	7.7%
One or two times per year	2.5%

Q2: How many web mail addresses do you have? (Sample size=915)

One	28.2%
Two	26.6%
Three	22.4%
Four	7.2%
Five or more	15.6%

Q3: For what purposes do you use web mail? Select all that apply from the list below. (Sample size=915, multiple answer)

Registering for mail magazines	57.6%
Communicating with real-life friends	53.4%
Prize draw registration	50.9%
Internet shopping	32.1%
Auction registration	29.4%
Work	25.4%
Communicating with email buddies	22.5%
Checking mail when away from home	18.0%
Home page webmaster address	10.9%
Dating site usage	2.0%
Other	2.2%

When asked what web mail features they used, the top answers were virus checking at 45.5%, then 44.9% taking advantage of mail address blocking (I don’t know if this means user whitelists and blacklists rather than general spam filtering), and 35.2% choosing filtering features, but whether this means user-specified filtering or the service provider’s spam filtering, again I do not know.

Finally, when asked what they would do if their web mail became a pay service, 8.3% would continue regardless, and 43.1% may continue depending on how much the charge was. This total of 51.4% willing to pay under certain circumstances is up 5.8 percentage points on last month’s survey.