Checking Email Obsessively Is True For 90 Percent Of Internet Users [Study]


Checking email is an obsession for 90 percent of Internet users, according to a new study issued by My.com.

The study discovered that the vast majority of people online admit to checking their email “compulsively,” and by that, they mean “checking email first thing in the morning, last thing at night, during meals and even during conversations,” Yahoo! reports.

The study also divulged expectation of a 27 percent increase (from 3.9 billion to 4.9 billion) in email accounts over the course of 2014 worldwide.

My.com led the survey of 1,000 American Internet users of varying demographics in April 2014 and assessed the data in the time since.

(The company has developed myMail, a free mobile email client with an intuitive user interface allowing users to manage all their email accounts — Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook.com, Hotmail, MSN and @my.com— from a single point.)

Some of their key findings include the following:

46 percent of internet users spend an hour or more per day simply reading emails.
70 percent of email users are checking email on their mobile device and 67 percent of Internet users want to know about new messages the moment they arrive in their inbox, thus turning on push notifications.
74 percent of respondents checked email first thing in the morning, 48 percent checked during lunch, 27 percent checked during dinner, and 56 percent checked as a last thing before bedtime. Furthermore, 8 percent admitted checking email “after sex.” Most also admitted to checking email during concerts and movies.
Just 33 percent of respondents have a single email account, and 27 percent of Internet users have three or more accounts.
60 percent of survey respondents admit to having lost important messages due to spam, while 64 percent said they had closed an email account due to frustration with excessive spam.
27 percent claimed to have “lost sleep” over stress related to email.
Last but not least, 67 percent of mobile email users enabled push notifications.

“We are seeing this paradox where people use email, but don’t feel that it meets their modern, mobile needs,” said Dmitry Grishin, co-founder and CEO of Mail.Ru Group. “To make email better, we needed to move beyond the stale iteration tied to traditional desktops, and go mobile-first and mobile-only. myMail and @my.com can only be accessed from a smartphone or tablet. No password. This is the future of email, as told by everyday email users.”

Here’s a link to the complete study.

[Image via ShutterStock]

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