世論 What Japan Thinks

Honestly, it’s not just because I’ve recently launched a Japanese emoticon and smiley dictionary that I’m picking up a number of surveys like this one from Point On Research and reported on by japan.internet.com into mobile phone email use, with the focus for this report on textual and graphical emoticons.

Demographics

On the 15th of February 2009 exactly 1,000 mobile phone users from the Point On Research monitor pool completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 50.0% of the sample were female, 20.0% in their teens, 20.0% in their twenties, 20.0% in their thirties, 20.0% in their forties, and 20.0% in their fifties.

Even though I have produced the above-mentioned emoticon dictionary, I don’t actually use text emoticons in my mobile email! Most of the time it is the built-in emoji graphical icons. I’d use more decomail (larger-sized, on the whole, animated gifs) but my phone is one of the first models to support them, so the user interface is pretty awkward to say the least.

I don’t get enough mobile emails to use any other pattern than immediate reply, but my blog email is another matter altogether…
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With so many free web-based mail services on offer, a surprising result from a survey conducted by Marsh Inc and reported on by japan.internet.com into web email was that a number of people do actually pay for it.

Demographics

Between the 29th of November and the 2nd of December 2008 300 people from the Marsh monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 50.0% of the sample were male, 20.0% were in their twenties, 20.0% in their thirties, 20.0% in their forties, 20.0% in their fifties, and 20.0% aged sixty or older.

Unfortunately, this survey did not report what sort of services people were paying for, although perhaps if you paid Marsh some money they’d tell you. I suppose I could say that I pay for two web mail services; one through this web site hosting as I do use the web mail reading facility, and the other is PoBox.com that I use for mail forwarding my private email, although I don’t use their web mail, which is an additional charge.
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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.
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This is another fascinating survey with quite surprising results. The survey is from MyVoice, where they looked into the issue of email.

Demographics

Over the first five days of April 2008 14,815 members of the MyVoice internet community successfully completed a private online questionnaire. 54% of the sample was female, 2% in their teens, 14% in their twenties, 37% in their thirties, 30% in their forties, and 17% in their fifties.

This is interesting to see how people use their computer and mobile phone email addresses. Mobile phones are restricted to mostly communication with friends and family, whereas computer-based email does many things.

Most of the new models of mobile phones support not just display but also the creation of HTML email; that is email with inline photos and emoji, but they do tend to chew up memory space on the mobile phones. I can’t really say there are many benefits from HTML email; having said that, DecoMail is HTML email and I couldn’t live without that feature now when communicating with the wife!
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Email newsletter, or as they are known in Japanese English mail magazines (which is usually then abbreviated to meru-maga) are a popular way for companies to communicate with their customers and potential customers. To find out how popular, japan.internet.com reported on a recent survey conducted by goo Research into email newsletters.

Demographics

Over the 20th and 21st of January 2008 (don’t ask me why japan.internet.com took three months to report!) 1,100 members of the goo Research online monitor group successfully completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.9% of the sample were male, 14.4% in their teens, 20.3% in their twenties, 21.4% in their thirties, 16.2% in their forties, and 27.6% aged fifty or older.

I run a wee newsletter myself, just a weekly summary of my surveys, other interesting news, stuff about blogging, and rounded off with something interesting or strange that happened to me in the past week. If you’d like to join or check the archives, visit the 世論 What Japan Thinks Google Groups Newsletter or sign up with this form:

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I don’t think I’ve mis-sent email last year, and I can only think of two incidents in the last few years where I have. One was in the office sending to my ex-team instead of my current team, so no problem, but the other was one I meant to send privately to a single person on a mailing list but I accidentally sent it to all, complete with a none-to-flattering portrayal of the list owner. Surprisingly enough I was summarily banned… Sadly, this recent report on japan.internet.com rearding a survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Research into mis-sent electronic mail at the workplace doesn’t dwell on the consequences suffered!

Demographics

On the 13th of March 2008 330 members of the JR Tokai Express Research monitor panel employed in either the public or private sector completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 81.2% of the sample was male, 8.8% in their twenties, 39.4% in their thirties, 38.8% in their forties, 11.8% in their fifties, and 1.2% in their sixties.

I’m surprised in Q1SQ2 that as many as a third of wrongly-addressed mail recipients replied to say the mail was incorrectly sent! At work we are supposed to set our mail programs to display a confirmation message before sending to give you a last chance to review data, although I don’t know how effective that is, or indeed if many people actually bother with it.
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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!
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One topic I often mention here is the apparent lack of sophistication amongst my Japanese colleagues when it comes to technical matters, despite working in a technical atmosphere. Our company recommends (but doesn’t enforce) Becky! and recommends that we avoid Outlook Express due to the many security weaknesses, although everyone should be running a virus scanner locally and our central server also has virus scanning. Despite these warnings, around a third of the engineers in my office still stick with Outlook Express, and most of the Becky! users don’t seem to have any automatic sorting to folders set up. There is one guy who runs emacs mail on Windows, which I think deserves some sort of award.

Ah yes, we had a survey to look at. japan.internet.com reported on one conducted by Cross Marketing Inc on the topic of electronic mail.

Demographics

On the 12th and 13th of September 2007 300 members of Cross Marketing Inc’s online monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. The group was split 50:50 male and female, and 25.0% in their twenties, 25.0% in their thirties, 25.0% in their forties, and 25.0% in their fifties.

As I’ve said before, I’m a big Becky! fan, as it’s got a great set of features without being bloatware and is well worth trying out.
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One of things my employer does manage to do right with my corporate mail box is keep it almost free from spam, with barely one per day getting past the filters, although I have no idea how many spams get caught, but I suspect it may be quite a few as my work email address can be found in postings on the internet. Sadly, a recent survey published by japan.internet.com and conducted by JR Tokai Express Research on the topic of workplace email does not report on how much of an issue spam is in the average workplace.

Demographics

On the 8th of June 2007 330 members of the JR Tokai Express Research online monitor group who worked in private industry completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 73.0% of the sample was male, 13.3% in their twenties, 45.5% in their thirties, 27.3% in their forties, 8.5% in their fifties, and 5.5% in their sixties.

Daily mail volume at work is probably close to 70 or so, including corporate internal semi-spam. However, … ahh, I must apply some self-censorship here, so just read the results, please.
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japan.internet.com recently published the results of a survey conducted by goo Research on the subject of email.

Demographics

Between the 18th and 19th of May 2007 1,084 members of goo Research’s internet monitor group successfully completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.1% of the sample was male, 16.9% in their teens, 19.6% in their twenties, 18.2% in their thirties, 17.2% in their forties, 17.1% in their fifties, and 11.2% aged sixty or older.

I have at least five main mail addresses, or eight if I include three mainly spam-collecting Gmail accounts, although all these accounts get read through Becky!. Spam is probably about 25 per day (Gmail silently swallows some huge amount, I suspect), although if I only count those missed by SpamAssassin, it’s closer to five to ten.
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