世論 What Japan Thinks

Having looked recently at the mobile market situation after one year of mobile number portability, here we look at the logical extension to this service in a report published by japan.internet.com on a survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Research Inc into PC and mobile phone email.

Demographics

On the 13th of November 2007 331 members of JR Tokai Express Research’s online monitor group employed in either the public or private sector (JR Tokai Express Research seems to have recently given up on the other demographics) successfully completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 83.1% were male, 8.8% in their twenties, 42.0% in their thirties, 36.6% in their forties, 10.6% in their fifties, and 2.1% in their sixties.

Most internet service providers offer mail forwarding services, but if you change providers you need to keep paying the old provider a small fee to cover the old address. However, long ago I moved my main private address to one provided by PoBox.com. For a small fee, about $50 every three years I think, they maintain an address that I can forward whereever I want. However, this won’t work for mobile phone email. However, looking at the results for Q1SQ1, it looks like I am the only person willing to pay!

Research results

First of all, 324 people from the original sample currently used either computer or mobile phone-based email.

Q1: Do you want to change one of your current email addresses? (Sample size=324)

Yes (to SQ)	11.7%
No	83.0%
Don’t know	5.2%

The top reason for wanting to change was that their current address got too much spam, and for not changing it was that it was too much of a pain to let everyone know about a new address.

Q1SQ: Would you want to use a service that forwarded email from your old address to your new one? (Sample size=38)

Would want to use if free	86.8%
Would want to use even for a fee	0.0%
Wouldn’t want to use	5.3%
Don’t know	7.9%

Q2: If you could change mobile phone service provider but keep your existing email address, would you like to use such a service? (Sample size=331)

Yes	77.2%
No	11.4%
Don’t know	11.4%