• Thunderbird

Thunderbird survey results

We want to thank you for having taken the time to answer the survey we conducted this last November amongst Thunderbird users. We wanted to better understand who you are, what you like, and what features you expect from Thunderbird. We have collected and scrutinized more than 2300 questionnaires in English, German, French and Japanese and we are pleased to share some results with you today.

(Note: the link to the survey was on Thunderbird start page, which means only those of you who have kept the start page could access the questionnaire).

First of all, to set the scene, here is some information about Thunderbird users. The daily number of Thunderbird instances checking for an update gives us a first indication of the total number of users. The Active Daily User number has peaked to 7.8m users in November 2011, and is spread as such:

But Active Daily Users is only a partial view of Thunderbird users: a lot of Thunderbird users sit behind a firewall or have turned update checking off. Therefore, this figure is really partial. Experience shows that we need to multiply this figure by a factor 2 to 2.5: we believe Thunderbird is used by 15m to 20m users in the world.

Now to the survey:

• More than 70% Thunderbird users are men! Please, tell your wife, daughter, partner how great Thunderbird is!
• Up to 90% of you use Firefox as a web browser.
• 65% of the respondents have 2 PCs or more and have Thunderbird on most of those PCs.
• +70% of respondents use either Instant Messaging or Social Network service. This is a slightly higher number than to ones measured in the industry (Forrester 2010: 68% of online Europeans now use social media each month.)

That said, we got a lot of feedback and requests about desired features…the good news is that in many cases -not all -but many cases, the desired features already exist, or are available via Add-ons. We want to be better at  sharing information with you. We are looking at ways to give you more information about Thunderbird and its capabilities in the future.

The Thunderbird Team