At the start of the study, we recognized that we knew relatively little about the levels of usage of various mail user agents in the JANET community. We could guess that some would be popular (Eudora and Pine, for example) and that others would be less so (for instance, binmail on Unix machines). So that we could make an informed decision on where effort should be applied, a survey was undertaken. Sue Weston compiled a brief questionaire and sent it to the mail-managers and uk-security mailing lists. Each contact was asked to summarize which MUAs were in use at that site for each of the four major platforms (IBM-PC, Macintosh, Unix and VMS) and to give an estimate of how many people used each MUA. Fifty-seven organizations responded, representing about a quarter of a million users. The results of the survey are given in Appendix A.
From the Appendix, it can be seen that 95% of MUA usage is taken up by 17 different packages. Almost a third of the usage comes from Pegasus, running on MS-DOS and/or MS-Windows machines. Three more account for another forty percent: Pine and Elm on Unix systems and Digital's Open-VMS MAIL. We were surprised at the relatively low usage claimed for Eudora, which came in ninth with only 2.4% of the population. It was decided that attempting to give at least 95% of the community at least a basic level of integration would be a worthy and achievable goal.