世論 What Japan Thinks

As usual, a Yahoo! service dominates the rankings, this time when JR Tokai Express Research Inc looked at PC-targeted free email services in a report published by japan.internet.com.

Demographics

On the 22nd of August 2008 333 members of the JR Tokai Express Research monitor panel employed in the public or private sector completed an online members-only questionnaire. 86.8% of the sample were male, 3.3% in their twenties, 34.5% in their thirties, 53.2% in their forties, and 9.0% in their fifties.

In Q2, I wonder why almost half of the sample use free mail services to subscribe to newsletters. Is it to protect privacy or anonymity, to keep one’s main mailbox clean, to take advantage of high-quality spam filters, to allow access from multiple locations, or what reason? Sadly, this issue is not addressed in this report.

Research results

Q1: What free mail services have you used? (Sample size=333, multiple answer)

	Votes	Percentage N=333	Usage percentage N=262
Yahoo! Mail	222	66.7%	84.7%
Windows Live/Hotmail	70	21.0%	26.7%
Gmail	62	18.6%	23.7%
goo Mail	42	12.6%	16.0%
infoseek Mail	20	6.0%	7.6%
livedoor Mail	19	5.7%	7.3%
nifty Mail	18	5.4%	6.9%
excite Mail	9	2.7%	3.4%
Don’t know	1	0.3%	0.4%
Other	6	1.8%	2.3%
Never used free email	71	21.3%	—

Note there are two percentage columns, based on the total number of people in the sample and the total number of free email users, 262 people, or 78.7%. These 262 were then asked the following questions.

Q2: For what purposes do you use free email services? (Sample size=262, multiple answer)

	Votes	Percentage
Email newsletter registration	126	48.1%
Auctions	82	31.3%
Contact with friends, family	73	27.9%
Shopping	70	26.7%
Other member site registration	61	23.3%
As a temporary expedient	53	20.2%
Community site	52	19.8%
Work-related	41	15.6%
Other	14	5.3%

Q3: Do you use throwaway email addresses? (Sample size=262)

Yes	40.1%
No	44.7%
Used to do so	9.2%
Don’t know	6.1%