{"id":37262,"date":"2021-10-08T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-10-08T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.litmus.com\/?p=37262"},"modified":"2025-12-12T16:16:51","modified_gmt":"2025-12-12T21:16:51","slug":"email-client-market-share-september-2021","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.litmus.com\/blog\/email-client-market-share-september-2021","title":{"rendered":"Email Client Market Share in September 2021: Early Data on the Impact of Apple\u2019s Mail Privacy Protection"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\t
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Welcome (back) to our monthly recap on the shifts and trends with email client market share that happened in the previous month. Compared to our annual email client market share<\/a> blog post, this series takes a look at the data on a month-to-month basis.<\/p>\n

And September has quite a few<\/i> curious observations because of a not-so-little thing called Mail Privacy Protection<\/a> (MPP) that Apple rolled out to its Mail app on iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 on September 20th.<\/p>\n

What did we see? Well, you\u2019re just going to have to keep reading to find out. \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n

Top 10 email clients overall<\/h2>\n

The top 3 email clients are still Apple iPhone (iOS Mail), Gmail, and Apple Mail (macOS Mail) both before and after MPP. To be extra clear, before MPP is data from September 1-19 and after MPP is data from September 20-30.<\/p>\n\"Top\n

So did MPP change anything? Yep\u2014after<\/i> MPP, Apple iPhone has finally been dethroned, losing 13.4% of its share from before MPP. Gmail is now ranked as the most popular email client overall.<\/p>\n

That being said, a decent chunk of iPhone\u2019s share has been taken by what we\u2019re dubbing \u201cApple Mail Privacy\u201d\u2014all opens impacted by MPP\u2014which accounts for 6.6% of email client market share (currently ranked #4). If we assume these are all from the iPhone (since the iPad\u2019s share is so small and macOS Monterey with MPP hasn\u2019t been released yet), then Apple iPhone would still be ranked #1.<\/p>\n

Two key things to note here: 1) MPP hides device data so we can\u2019t differentiate between iOS, iPadOS, or macOS, and 2) the new OSes also don\u2019t differentiate between MPP and non-MPP in the user agent data it passes. Meaning all<\/i> opens from the Mail app on iOS 15 and iPadOS 15\u2014whether or not MPP is activated\u2014look the same to us<\/i>. I know. We weren\u2019t expecting that. The silver lining is we do<\/i> expect most people who upgrade their Apple OS to turn on MPP, so our data is likely very close to reality anyway.<\/p>\n \t\t\t<\/div>\n \t\t<\/div>\n \t<\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Before MPP<\/strong><\/p>\n

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  1. Apple iPhone (iOS Mail): 38.2%<\/li>\n
  2. Gmail: 36.0%<\/li>\n
  3. Apple Mail (macOS Mail): 10.5%<\/li>\n
  4. Outlook: 5.3%<\/li>\n
  5. Yahoo Mail: 3.0%<\/li>\n
  6. Google Android: 2.3%<\/li>\n
  7. Apple Mail Privacy: 1.5%<\/li>\n
  8. Outlook.com: 1.3%<\/li>\n
  9. Apple iPad (iPadOS Mail): 1.2%<\/li>\n
  10. Samsung Mail: 0.6%<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n <\/div>\n \t\t<\/div>\n
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    After MPP<\/strong><\/p>\n

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    1. Gmail: 36.5%<\/li>\n
    2. Apple iPhone (iOS Mail): 33.0%<\/li>\n
    3. Apple Mail (macOS Mail): 10.0%<\/li>\n
    4. Apple Mail Privacy: 6.6%<\/li>\n
    5. Outlook: 5.9%<\/li>\n
    6. Yahoo Mail: 2.7%<\/li>\n
    7. Google Android: 2.2%<\/li>\n
    8. Outlook.com: 1.1%<\/li>\n
    9. Apple iPad (iPadOS Mail): 1.1%<\/li>\n
    10. Samsung Mail: 0.6%<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \t<\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n\t
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      Quick note: You might be wondering why we have Apple Mail Privacy data before<\/i> MPP. That\u2019s because we were capturing data from folks using the beta release to open their emails.<\/p>\n

      With just 10 days of MPP data at the end of September, we\u2019re seeing:<\/p>\n