Need help with understanding email usage

[yannc2021]

My name is Emma and my team is exploring a new startup opportunity to create a smart email client. We aim to re-design and re-engineer email so we can communicate and work with higher efficiency. We are just at the beginning of our journey, and we are validating the problem statement.

As part of our customer exploration, I would love to ask you some simple questions about your email usage.

1. How often do you check and reply to your emails? Do you allocate specific times during the day or check as soon as new email arrives?
2. How many emails do you receive/send per day?
3. How many unread emails do you have on average?
4. How much time per day do you usually spend on emails?
5. What email clients are you using? Mobile/Web(desktop or browser)?
6. How many email accounts do you have? How do you navigate between them? (Work vs personal)
7. What features of your email client do you like to use?
8. How do you search for things? What are you usually looking for?
9. How often do you feel stressed dealing with your emails?
10. If you are stressed about emails: Have you tried to find or used a solution to help with your problems?
11. If yes to above, what did you love about the solution you tried? What did you hate about it?

In particular, I'm interested to know what are your biggest pains, problems, and frustrations when dealing with emails.

Any feedback or input from you would be of great help to me! Thank you so much!

[jeffpan]

email is close to die for personal usage.
my mailbox is full of commercial ADs, notify etc. I have got no regular email from a friend for long days. all the guys use mobile IM for communication.
It has no future if you focus on personal email market.
But for biz usage, yes, email still has wide landscape.

[TenFour]

1. Check frequently all day long.
2. Probably 10-20 on my personal accounts. 50-100 at work.
3. In my personal account I read most email immediately. In my work account I probably have at least 10 unread at any one time, but I try to at least glance and action each one by the end of the day.
4. My guess would be 1 hour for personal. Maybe 3-4 hours for work since that's the main way we communicate with many people.
5. Personal email: Fastmail on the web and Android. Work: Outlook on the web and phone, plus Outlook desktop app.
6. I have two main personal email accounts and one main account for work. I have two windows open at work: one for personal one for work. On my phone I have Fastmail and Outlook app on the homescreen. All my personal email funnels to Fastmail.
7. I really like having contacts, calendar, files, and notes all together like on the Fastmail app. At a minimum I think you need email, contacts, and calendar together in one app.
8. For personal email I dump everything into one archive and use the search function to find things. For Outlook at work I have many folders because Outlook search is terrible.
9. I don't feel stressed unless I go on vacation someplace I can't check email for many days. Then I have a backlog of hundreds of emails to wade through. I prefer to just check my work email in odd moments on my phone.
10. Not stressed.
11. N/A

Good luck with your research!

[janusz]

Reflecting my personal usage

1. Several times a day. Usually, I reply straightaway, with more complicated matters I reply later, at my own convenience (not a fixed times)
2. Receive 10-15 (mostly various newsletters). Send 4-5
3. Very few (under 10)
4. Roughly 20 minutes
5. 50% webmail, 50% email client (k-9 on Android)
6. Two accounts used regularly, a few more for special purposes (nothing important/urgent)
7. Spellchecker, not necessarily as a part of an email package
8. Use the search facility in the client and another search facility in the webmail
9. Rarely.

Email has a future, it is a universally adopted standard allowing full interconnectivity.

[JeremyNicoll]

1. once at the start of the day and occasionally after that
2. receive 100-200 (mainly from techy mail lists), send: up to ten/day
3. depends; for mail list discussions if I'm tired I sometimes let a
whole discussion accumulate then read it in one go; I also let
unimportant stuff wait if there's more important stuff also waiting
4.1-3 hours
5. webmail (with 2 mail hosting companies): roundcube and fastmail
6. two main ones, some others as experiments. Split is arbitrary, to
avoid all eggs being in one basket, if one is unavailable/broken
7. fastmail's webmail is very fast; roundcube slower - both rely on
mail hosts' infrastructure not being too highly loaded. I probably
prefer a decent (ie rfc-compliant, robust, user-customisable,
not "trendy" dekstop email client)
8. I rarely search because I use hundreds of filters to categorise
mails into many folders (with both providers). I also have many
hundreds of email addresses, giving me granular control of how
mails to/from them are manipulated
9. not stressed often, but loss of internet so no access to online
mail can happen at very inconvenient times
10. not tried alternate connections

[TenFour]

It has no future if you focus on personal email market.

Not true for personal use! My family uses email to share things like longer articles or letters to be read at leisure, important documents that must be read and saved, important attachments like PDFs of tax forms, long lists, etc. Friends from long ago send me emails to an address I've had as long as there has been email. I have reached out to people I haven't corresponded with in years via an old email address because it is unlikely to change. Lots of people I know have changed phone numbers numerous times in the same period they have maintained an email address. I also receive many important things to my personal email: bills, tax forms, notices, etc. It is the main way most people stay in touch with clubs, nonprofits, newsletters, etc.

[Berenburger]

Originally Posted by TenFour

Not true for personal use! My family uses email to share things like longer articles or letters to be read at leisure, important documents that must be read and saved, important attachments like PDFs of tax forms, long lists, etc. Friends from long ago send me emails to an address I've had as long as there has been email. I have reached out to people I haven't corresponded with in years via an old email address because it is unlikely to change. Lots of people I know have changed phone numbers numerous times in the same period they have maintained an email address. I also receive many important things to my personal email: bills, tax forms, notices, etc. It is the main way most people stay in touch with clubs, nonprofits, newsletters, etc.

in fact, email has become our personal archive.

[TenFour]

in fact, email has become our personal archive.

So true! We all like to travel in my family and often to places with little or no cellphone connectivity. However, it is great to hear about the trip via long emails that can be written at leisure and then sent when the next Wifi is found, even if you can't get cell service. Yes, we do a lot of texting too, but mostly very short stuff. Email is the modern equivalent of letter writing while texting is more like sending a telegram.

[JeremyNicoll]

I agree with that; I barely use SMSes. I wouldn't expect - say - a lawyer to send me a text; I'd expect an email with attached PDFs.

[FredOnline]

If the OP is genuine, this is not a very efficient way to collect information.

Would be better using something like Google Forms.

[janusz]

... which is true even if the OP isn't genuine

[hadaso]

Originally Posted by JeremyNicoll

I agree with that; I barely use SMSes. I wouldn't expect - say - a lawyer to send me a text; I'd expect an email with attached PDFs.

My lawyer does send me an SMS sometimes. But this is only because I don't use WhatsApp, which is what he uses most of the time. And then of course he uses email sometimes to send me files, also because I don't use WhatApp.
Today I actually got a personal email from my sister (it started with: "This is for those of you who are not on Facebook/LinkedIn (and one of you who is not even on WhatsApp)."

[webecedarian]

Gee, Emma, you posted two months ago, but weren't interested enough or courteous enough to return to acknowledge the replies? This doesn't bode well for your project.

[hadaso]

Originally Posted by webecedarian

Gee, Emma, you posted two months ago, but weren't interested enough or courteous enough to return to acknowledge the replies? This doesn't bode well for your project.

It doesn't mean she doesn't read the replies.
several years ago (around the end of 2003) someone started a thread with some similar questions: said they are planning a new email services and plan to have about 30 million users within a few month of launching their service, and asked what people here would like to see in such a service. Of course many of the suggestions were what people were used to at the email services popular in these forums. A few months later (April 2004) a new email service was launced. It was quite different from what we knew up till then, but had some of the functionality that was suggested in the thread. And within a few months it reached 30 million users. Back then it was possible for a user that started a thread to delete the whole thread including the replies, so that thread is no longer in this site (I hope it's in some backup).
It doesn't mean that this thread represents a similar project, but then, who knows?

[somdcomputerguy]

Originally Posted by yannc2021

My name is Emma and my team is exploring a new startup opportunity to create a smart email client.

Originally Posted by webecedarian

Gee, Emma, you posted two months ago, but weren't interested enough or courteous enough to return to acknowledge the replies? This doesn't bode well for your project.

Originally Posted by hadaso

It doesn't mean she doesn't read the replies.

Acknowledgement(s) certainly would've been a nice thing though, esp. from a validable project/company.

Originally Posted by hadaso

It doesn't mean that this thread represents a similar project, but then, who knows?

A project like DeltaChat maybe? https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=deltachat