September 27, 2020

Caniemail’s First Birthday 🎂

It’s been a year since I officially unveiled Can I email. And while I missed the mark for a proper birthday party, I feel like this is a good opportunity to summarize what’s happened so far and where the project is heading.

In this first year, the site received over 97 000 visitors and generated more than 580 000 page views. 70% of visits happen on desktop.*

In its first month, the site received a tremendous support of coverage from various social and news sites (like Reddit, Hacker News, Lobsters, CSS Tricks, Codrops, Smashing Magazine, …).

Because of this extraordinary coverage, one of the weirdest feedback I got early on was that people were very confused about the purpose of the site (example). For its first week, about a third of searches were for celebrities names like “Barack Obama” or “The Pope”, or people’s own email addresses. Turns out for people unfamiliar with Can I use, the name of the site was pretty confusing. The fix was rather simple: I added “HTML, CSS, …” as a placeholder in the search field. And in the following days, these kind of searches went from one third to one out of fifty.

I was able to provide a few more features along the year, including: making all data available as JSON for external use, settings, estimated support, email clients pages, as well as a lot more data overall.

We now have 165 features tested across 30 email clients (up from 50 features across 25 email clients a year ago).

I’m aware there is still a long way to go to provide a more complete set of features. And this is why I’ve updated my roadmap to build better documentation over the upcoming year.

Perhaps my greatest return to work on this project is to see so many positive feedback and messages shared. I love seeing tweets and messages from people all around the world. So please continue to share the site and share the knowledge you get from it.

And happy first birthday to Can I email!

Rémi
@HTeuMeuLeu

(* 2021/09/29 update: For some reason, Analytics is giving me completely different numbers from what I had noted last year. Previous numbers can still be found on GitHub.)