Yahoo Tops AOL in No. 1 E-mail Spot: Epsilon

Yahoo has replaced AOL as the No. 1 e-mail box provider with 23% market share up from 19% a year ago, compared to AOL which has 15% of the market compared to 20% a year ago, e-mail service provider Epsilon Interactive reported yesterday.

Also, Google’s Gmail is beginning to grab serious market share with 5% of the market this year, compared to 1% a year ago, Epsilon reported in it annual e-mail survey.

In other findings, Epsilon reported:

* 43% of MSN/Hotmail and 19% of Yahoo! users report having seen an authentication confirmation or warning in the header (Sender ID and DomainKeys, respectively).

* “Upgrading to broadband/high-speed” (33%) comes second only to price (38%) as the primary reason why consumers switched or considered switching their ISP over the last year. This number is up significantly from 25% who cited broadband as their reason last year.

* Eighteen percent of those surveyed indicated that they use their work e-mail addresses to receive personal marketing offers, pointing to the growing importance of understanding the business-to-business deliverability.

* The number of marketers encouraging consumers to add them to their address books, which provides marketers with benefits commensurate to Enhanced Whitelisting, remained virtually unchanged between 2005 and 2006 (43% vs. 42%).

* The majority of consumers (60%, up from 57% last year), agreed that the email communications they receive from companies they do business with are more targeted/relevant than the communications they received from those same companies last year.

* Consumers who receive legitimate e-mail offers are more likely to act on them, with 47% of respondents saying they would make a purchase online after opening a relevant email and 65% indicated they would purchase offline based on the email they received.

Reports of false positives are down slightly, with 22% of those surveyed indicating they have recently lost or did not receive an e-mail that they were supposed to receive from a trusted source, compared to 25% last year.