Good thing Gmail is out of beta. It is now the third largest Web mail service in the U.S. In July, Gmail nudged past AOL Email with 37 million unique visitors compared to 36.4 million for AOL, according to comScore estimates. (Gmail is the orange line in the chart below). That puts Gmail within sight of the No. 2 player, Windows Live Hotmail, which has 47 million unique visitors. After that there is a wide gulf separating Yahoo Mail and its 106 million monthly unique visitors.
The last time checked on Gmail’s progress was at the beginning of the year, when it seemed like it would still take at least two years for it to catch up to its nearest rivals. But so far this year, Gmail’s unique visitors grew 25 percent, while AOL’s declined 22 percent. Thus, the two crossed paths in July. (Hotmail grew only 8 percent during the same period, while Yahoo Mail increased unique visitors by a healthy 16 percent).
If Google wants Gmail to pass Hotmail quickly and gain the No. 2 spot, my suggestion is to keep pumping in new enhancements through Gmail Labs and to speed up the pace at which mail storage increases. Not that I am a typical user, but I am already at 97 percent of my allotted 7,358 megabytes. One of the primary lures of Gmail has always been its seemingly endless and ever-expanding storage limits. Please don’t make me pay for more storage.
Uh, bigger suprise: people still use hotmail?
PRAISE GOOGLENTOLOGY!
Gmail is robust in its ajax. If a call to server fails it doesn’t hang, nor prompts user, but retries by itself. Even google reader is robust, it doesnt hang requiring page refresh, though it demands user’s manual retry.
Google, WE NEED MORE GMAIL IDENTITIES!!! PLEASE!!!
With free Google Apps do you really need more IDs?
Yes, people still use Hotmail. I’m one of them. It’s actually pretty awesome.
And yes, I use Gmail too.
No, Hotmail is not awesome, it sucks.
it sucks even more when you miss spell the title as “hot male” when your 8 years old
What is even worse is http://www.hoimale.com
Bad idea when you are younger
I’m shocked that people still use Hotmail – even with the recent makeover it’s still pretty awful – the performance is terrible…
I’m sure that Gmail’s usage will grow as people keep on signing up to Google’s services – collect the set etc. etc.
@The article’s author – no, I don’t think that you are a typical user re. storage I suspect that you know this too…
Hotmail is the scourge of web mail. It must fall quickly.
Hotmail is supper….
gmail is just a kid in front of that…
how much gmail is paying u guys so that they can read ur email inbox…
“Hotmail is supper…”
Hotmail soon WILL be “supper” for the ravenous Google GMail monster.
Just wait and see when ads are coming in your hotmail box, sooner or later…
Yeah hotmail sucks blah blah blah.. without a single reason why, except that all the ‘cool’ nerds use gmail right?
You people are pathetic. You give you privacy away by using gmail. That is why gmail sucks, and only idiots use it. End of story.
@Notreal: somebody had to say that. You did so thank you.
*from somebody who has never and will never use GMail, and is not dying from lack of online email features because I don’t use it*
Dude Rick and Jhon,
supper was a typo… I meant HOTMAIL IS SUPER…
sorry I meant SUPER…
I agree with you. Do people still use Hotmail? I doubt comScore’s stats. And by the way, why is it taking Gmail to nudge to even Spot no. 3? Any idea?
YAY Gmail! The only reason Yahoo has so many people is because they bundle it with at&t home cable and sbcglobal is really just yahoo as well. If google bought up other companies who already had millions of users, then it would be number one too.
hotmail is on its last legs and yahoo will be ex growth by end of year
This is true, because it came out of your wide azz?
Any guess of what caused Yahoo’s email growth? Was it site traffic, ymail/rocketmail or something else?
Probably some of its sites that require a yahoo id such as yahoo answers
Guess you don’t realize that this just measures people who use Yahoo! Mail. Obviously Yahoo has far more user ids than 106M in the US.
yeah they never close old account, I don’t remember me the last email I send via my old yahoo account and the mail box is still there
Yeah, but this has nothing to do with accounts. They are tracking unique visitors. That means this is more about usage. You could have all three emails yahoo, gmail and hotmail. Which many people do. You just rally up points for the one that you actually use.
Well, I needed to get a Yahoo mail to sign up with yahoo answers.
yahoo ids automatically have an email adress.
so no, yahoo does not have more then 106M in the US.
But what you are saying IS true for google and Windows Live. I have a live account which uses my gmail address, so I don;t have a live email address. And my mother uses a google account with her hotmail address. so she doesn’t have a gmail address.
So you are the one not realizing stuff.
Yahoo started out very early in the web mail game back in 1997.
Also Yahoo has had free unlimited storage capabilities for a number of years now. The fact that Google still limits users space even if it’s a large amount seems just quite mind boggling, as a Yahoo Mail user.
Good point on the early entry, but I’m guessing that you’re not an engineer, otherwise you would understand the difference between the way marketing use the word “unlimited” and reality. You probably believe your “up XMb/s” broadband actually delivers XMb/s too…
I use them both Yahoo for personal stuff and Gmail for things that I don’t mind Google data mining for the Secret Service’s San Francisco field office.
The office must have grown 25% in a year too.
What’s mind boggling is that people willing choose Yahoo when they STILL charge to forward mail, effectively locking you in to that email address forever.
Gmail has always let you forward your mail on to any account, for free, for as long as you want.
Read 2nd comment, what patrick wrote
Yet people constantly claim Google is a one-hit wonder…
If a standalone company ran any of AdSense, Gmail, OR Google Maps, it would be considered a HUGE success.
I like it that I’m able to use one account for all google services, but you’re right people are afraid to give google so much “control”
Adsense was ripped from GoTo.com. It wasn’t Google’s idea.
Gmail is nothing special. Just a mailing tool like everything else.
Google Maps was bought from another company.
Now if you think how much brain power they should have in Googleplex then it is rather sad..
“Just a mailing tool” – The spam feature on it is unbelievably good, Google search is also a brilliant creation.
Actually, Gmail owns postini, which is a premier corporate spam/virus scanning tool… So yes, they bought that too.
What’s your point? I don’t care where google got their software from, the point is that its great software and it supplies a superior service.
Gmail had spam filtering long before Google acquired Postini, and my own experience with both is that Gmail’s spam filtering is noticeably better than what Google makes available to enterprises through Postini.
There’s much to criticize about Gmail–mostly its taking the premise of “keep it simple” to a point that it’s missing basic features. But let’s at least keep the facts straight.
Yeah but you defiantly are all gonna be eating your words when google unveils google WAVE. which is what E-Mail should be… ohhh and btw that was all google…….
Companies with any of those standalone wouldn’t be considered huge successes if they failed to be profitable.
And not to mention they’d have to be successful without Google’s base…
Heh, I use gmail for my spam can. Several accounts actually. I expect there are many like me.
I use two yahoo ids and live emails for spam can.
Gmail ID is my actual ID. I expect there are many like me.
@Mishra, I have 2 Yahoo IDs to help me fight spam; I rely on Gmail
M
I have two gmails with my spam(used for signing up to stuff on net) gmail forwarded to a specified label in my main gmail acct.
TO back it all up all gmails received from main acct are forwarded to comcast acct which frwrds it to yahoo.
I have all 3, Gmail is by far the best. Filter my spam perfectly. Hotmail/Yahoo always let spam into my Inbox and sometimes send good email to Junk.
Hotmail is attached to MSN Messenger, so it’s convenience. Probably Yahoo as well.
I heard a story that IT manager filter hiring through email: all hotmails account on resume are out. No offence, hotmail/yahoo as primary account are for non-techie or simply too lazy to learn new UI.
If hiring manages are filtering candidates by email, per Louis, then they are doing lousy job. I call them lazy a@#H@&^%
I have hotmail, yahoo, and my univeristy email going to gmail. IT is awesome, I started using gmail to receive emails for my university emails (10 mb limit) it got spammed and gmail blocks them VERY well
, all of the extra space doesn’t hurt either. What made google even more awesome is allowing you to use external SMTP servers. I still have a gripe with using yahoo’s SMPT’s through google.
I just checked my Hotmail, which I do once in a while. There’s no spam in any of my other email accounts (Gmail is the best at catching it), but Hotmail’s packed with it. The worst thing, though, is that two emails are phishing expeditions from “Hotmail”, inviting me to hand over my password to “confirm my account”. It really says something about them that they can’t even catch that before it gets to me!
I thought Gmail was bigger than AOL already, I’m shocked, I guess there’s a lot of grandmas out there using AOL still, well, Hotmail you’re next in line.
“… Gmail nudged past AOL Email with 37 million unique visitors compared to 36.4 million for AOL… ”
this means these 37 million peoples Inbox is being read by goog…. sorry for those 37 million people… huh…
“… my suggestion is to keep pumping in new enhancements through Gmail Labs and to speed up the pace at which mail storage increases…”
o come on…give me a break… these labs thing… how reliable is this… if this is in lab why would i use it… since i am not gauranted that the service would be up….
As if Google is reading each of your emails. I guess you might have known it too, some automatic scripts will be there to extract each words from d emails and bounce them against their search engine and show those adds in right hand side. Pretty simple stuff. Are u really expecting any human doing that stuff. How lame that wud be…
Google Labs may be not answer to get more users, but by “Wave” they will certainly get a loads of users.
Anyone who believes Google “reads” your e-mail is a technologically ignorant (& probably tin-foil hat wearing) fool.
ur check of $10 from ggo would be delivered to your address…
if they dont read ur email, how come their ads shows based on my email contents?
You’re suggesting then that an automated program that matches keywords in your e-mail to those targeted by ads is “reading” your e-mail? That’s laughable. Does a server that brings your e-mail up off a server in order to render it as HTML “read” it as well? Oh noez…I guess you better avoid Yahoo and Hotmail as well!
Or do you think there’s a room full of Google employees sitting around reading e-mails in order to select those ads?
@arrogantgoogler: “tharo dholnaa arrr arrr”. Won’t make any sense to you unless you know Hindi. Exactly the point; reading doesn’t mean you understand – the fact that google has AI behind gmail that tries to make sense of content is what frightens other people. It doesn’t matter whether there is an automated program that reads email contents and creates user profiles for targeting. The very fact that google uses that information to sell ads is what people have objections to. So, yeah; in a sense; “robin what?” is right. Your argument regarding “html, server”etc is just a lame attempt to show your tech savvy.
Hotmail and Yahoo also “read” your emails. And they have AI behind their programs too.
How do you think anti-spam are working ?
@Mike, right on. I understand people’s fears about privacy, it’s still a little bit of a wild west system when it comes to how corporations will behave, but the idea that Google is worse about this than Microsoft and Yahoo is oh so laughable.
Jim, I would argue that @arrogantgoogler has a perfect analogy and you fail pretty hard at defeating it.
Everyone is oh so scared because Google passes your email through a piece of code. Well, duh. Big super, ubber duh. Your email goes through numerous pieces of code all the time. Just because Google’s piece of code is intelligent and useful (in theory…no wait, I did click on one of those links once, so yes useful) all the sudden it is this terrifying things. His analogy is a bit obtuse, but perfectly valid. There are many things out there “reading” your email in the same fashion that Google is. They just came up with a way to make money off it. Oh, and because its so damn smart, it is a bit unnerving. I will grant you that. When my wife and I get into it and you see “Need relationship advice?” you are just like “Whoa…” but I still use it. Its an algorithm. Just because its good at what it does doesn’t change that core fact.
I have a live account, love it…
I don’t use email. LOL
I’ll stick to my Windows Live Account for personal contact, and personally love the integration which Microsoft has got in terms of Xbox and Zune, (though I only an Xbox, its nice to know the reach of my ID).
You really think that 7GB+ of storage is not enough? I’m not so sure about that. Increasing it is a good thing, but implying that increasing it at a faster rate will get them significantly more visitors is a bit of a disconnect for me.
Yes, not having unlimited storage will affect some small percent (I would guess less than 0.1%) of users and could potentially create backlash. However, the likely hood of that happening must be small. Users recognize that storage costs money in most cases and will pay for it.
I would argue that keeping features free is the biggest thing they can continue to do right. Compare Gmail to Yahoo Mail. Yahoo has unlimited storage (http://www.tech...imited-storage/). Gmail charges. Gmail has features like IMAP, POP, Forwarding for free. Yahoo charges.
I wonder where Yahoo mail would stand if you weren’t required to create one to make a yahoo account.
These results are projected actual monthly users, not simply people with accounts. It’s an estimate of people who actually use the email services. For all of these services, the portion represented by people creating new accounts each month is pretty small.
thank you
Gmail is the best web mail service so people love it.
Sorry… Folders > Labels.
Therefore, Gmail is NOT the best web mail service.
Actually, once you get the hang of it it’s quite more convenient.
Plus, Gmail works very well everywhere: Mail.app, iPhone, Safari on the iPhone. Clean, lean, accessible fast email on all my devices. With search.
Folders can’t beat that. Yahoo certainly can’t beat that with the bloated interface.
Best
Hans
Folders > Labels (Wrong)
When u have labels… U can see your emails both in the inbox and labels. By color labels its easy to spot them in the web display.
And if u don’t want them in inbox, just put an additional rule to “skip inbox”, so that u wont see it again.
Hence Labels >>>> Folders…
And GMAILS WINS…. LOL
You can have an email with 7 labels, but it can only exist in 1 folder.
Because of this, labels > folders.
At the risk of pointing out the obvious, if you label all your mail MECE (mutually exclusive commonly exhaustuve – so you give each mail exactly 1 label), you effectively have folders.
As a result, by definition, labels are better than folders because they don’t force MECE.
Uh…no. I used labels as folders for quite some time before I got my head around them. Really, if you do 1to1 there is no difference between a label and a folder.
Once you get the concept of the label, however, they blow the whole old organizational concepts right the %$@# out of the water. You are comparing hieroglyphs to typeset simply because you are familiar with the pretty pictures. Once you get the letters concept, its a whole new world.
why is Gmail icon showing BETA status on this article? It’s not showing BETA status when I go to gmail.
The author states in the first sentence of the article, “Good thing Gmail is out of beta.”
He does, but they keep using the google icon with the beta attached, many articles since beta…
Good for Google and their Gmail team. Personally I have always likes Gmail but never used it. I havent seen a real reason why. I have a .me account and I use my personal domain for a email address. Not to say that I don’t have a gmail account, I just never use it.
As for you about to run out of space in you account, can’t you just delete all those old messages, and spam to relieve space?
In gmail Spam is cleaned up every 30 days
you can use every domain name with gmail for free, check http://www.google.com/a
You can use GMail with your own domain – just setup Google Apps (free for personal use) with your domain.
Spam is deleted automatically on a regular basis. Personally I pay for additional space – I prefer all the great features to more free space.
/Peter
P.S. The calendar that comes with GMail is great – I just love the SMS notification feature.
P.P.S. Google App Engine will also host your own website for free (of course also on your own domain).
I’m sure sooner or later Gmail will become the number one! The spam filter is the best one I have ever seen.
Thanks Google for filtering ~450 spam mails every day.
(I was one of the first yahoo mail users, badly spammed all the years and that why the account was never used so much)
“Error: the server didn’t return any data for the contents of this message Click here to try again” is why I don’t use Yahoo. Email as a conversation and a clean page is why i use Gmail.
How come the CrunchBase logo of Gmail still says “beta”?
It is a reading assignment to you. Answer is given already.
Move your lazy a@@ mind and read the posts to find the answer!
A couple more years and Gmail will be number 1.
We all know where Gmail is progressing to. It is just a matter of time when they will occupy the numero uno position.
I am surprised MSN hotmail is not top.
Microsoft is clearly the best for everything.
I wonder if the figures are accurate.
Yahoo has a junk user interface.
M$ is NOT the best for everything. Yes, there are some things they do well. full stop.
True, the ymail interface is busy. I wish for more customization features.
Gmail is the best! It’s really doing great.
What a wonderfully useless statistic for all involved.
Harry “I bet the folks with fake e-mail accounts (especially spammers) rejoice in knowing they boost all these services’ counts higher” Wang
Long live dynosaurs… ! Thought they were dead way back, but # of AOLers disprove that!
Does this include all the fraudsters using free email providers in their eCommerce sprees? I suspect the numbers could be a lot lower for all (a smaller drop for AOL compared to gmail and hotmail, BTW).
What about POP only users like me? Do they count in any of the statistics?
I never use the Gmail web access as I can not view messages sorted by sender or subject which is important for the way I use my email account.
Hotmail is so high because of its XBOX users. Since Microsoft builds Passport into everything they do, and hotmail is the default passport provider, every time a new XBOX user comes around, another hotmail account it likely to be created.
On a side note, someone mentioned that Google Maps was not an original product of Google’s, that AdSense was ripped from GoTo.com, and that Gmail is nothing special… obviously they have a lot to learn from history. Innovation doesn’t always mean creating something entirely from scratch, but taking something that was already invented and making it so much better than the original that nobody cares about the original anymore.
Google Maps WAS created inside Google (Google Earth, the installed application, was the one they purchased)… so you’re mixing your applications.
AdSense may have borrowed an idea from GoTo.com, but this is where the “do no evil” concept came from. What GoTo.com was doing was evil. They were displaying paid-links as if they were organic links. This ultimately lead to irrelevant results, which is why GoTo.com never caught on. It worked for marketers and nobody else. AdSense insisted on transparency and won.
As for Gmail, you might personally think it is nothing special… but look back in history to a time when Yahoo was offering 5 or 10 MEGABYTES of storage for inboxes and they charged extra money for POP3/SMTP access. Gmail came along and suddenly all of the other players skyrocketed their storage space significantly, and stopped charging money for premium services. With Gmail today, you get all the storage you need, the best spam filter around, free POP3/SMTP, filters that you can configure to automatically categorize your emails, forward the emails, etc… so many free features plus new add-ons every month that give you more choices to organize your emails and customize the interface.
If you choose to stick with Yahoo or Hotmail (Windows Live Mail), that’s great… it’s your choice… but just because you choose something, this does not automatically mean all other options must somehow “suck” to justify your decision. When this happens, you’re usually just compensating for a lack of confidence. (By the way, Microsoft didn’t “create” Hotmail/Live Mail… they bought Hotmail years ago.)
Hey, this is TechCrunch, quit posting facts in the comments section. You’re supposed to restrict yourself to inflammatory nonsense!
Though I can’t assert validity of the facts, Thanks for taking time to do the research and throw light. Great job!
I use gmail for its great spam filtering then let it forward to my Yahoo! account for reading.
Simple: in Yahoo! TOS they state explicitly that they WON’T read your email for the purpose of ad targeting, whereas GoOgle does so, whenever you open a piece of gmail for reading. This leads one to wonder what else they’re reading, and for what.
Were GoOgle to drop this practice, I’d consider switching.
P.S., Oh, and, I’ve found an MSN account to be useful at very rare times in obtaining certain types of MS assistance. So it might be worth having one, to speed things along.
Gmail is the best web mail service.. It’s really doing great. i have several account.
What happened to MySpace email?
LOL
GMail need a pop-up type address selector to send to multiple people before it even gets close to the Yahoo’s capability. I fanyone knows how to send multiple forwards, pls let me know
I tried switching over to gmail, but I have more than 5 accounts that I’d like to use (Gmail limits you to 5 addon accounts), so I had to switch back to Yahoo mail, to which I’ve been a paying member since before they had unlimited storage.
The folderlabel terminology difference between them was odd for me at first, but it’s not a deal breaker.
Google & microsoft really attacking each other . in this article google punches microsoft
have a look at this .
http://www.tech...ches-microsoft/
Thanks,
Henry
A tip for Gmail to surpass Hotmail: let Entourage users know that if you want to connect to Hotmail, you have to pay for a premium Hotmail account. But if you want to connect your Gmail to Entourage — you can do it for free! And Microsoft technical support will walk you through the process.
Nice, I would also like to share this with you
http://www,techmasher.comGoogle & microsoft really attacking each other . in this article google punches microsoft
have a look at this .
http://www.tech........microsoft/Thanks,
Henry
Great Article !
Google & microsoft are attacking each other in this article google punches microsoft have a look at this
http://www.tech...ches-microsoft/Thanks
Henry
Nice one but at the other hand
google punches microsoft check it out.
http://www.tech...ches-microsoft/The reason GMail has moved up so fast and Hotmail is where it is at is because they are the two worste email sites for hacking and sending SPAM. No wonder their numbers are so high.
Cool Gmail has many advanced features which is helping to gain the market share
great to see yahoo as #1. yahoo! rocks!
uhm yay google. i gmail, but gmail is too easily hacked. i like what they have with google labs and rolling out new features. hotmail used to suck, but they are getting better and offering users more ways to connect in the facebook/livejournal kind of way young people seem to like. i used to have a yahoo, and i think that was my favourite account, but it’s also linked to flickr and now i don’t have a flickr account. aol mail is pretty sercure but they’re just getting around to offering users more features. i agree with google increasing it’s storage.
i’m actually surprised aol is still alive. i had/have multiple aol accounts, but i don’t use them. i think aol mail so fair has been the worst out of all my email user experience. it’s nice that they now allow me to choose whatever colour schematics i want for my mail account but it’s kinda late.
A perfect example of TechCrunch comment nonsense! Congratulations mertz!
Care to back up your claim that “gmail is too easily hacked”? Any e-mail system relying on unencrypted connections is susceptible to cookie-sniffing attacks and Google is not unique in this vulnerability. But you can access gmail for free through https connections, which makes the service extremely secure:
http://mail.goo...amp;answer=8155
i should have said that depending on the password people use their email accounts are hackable. lol. my gmail has been hacked once, and i think the same person used that information to hack into my hotmail, but that was my fault for being stupid, obviously. i actually have no problem with gmail. the filters good, and that’s all i care about. hotmail’s filter is getting better too. i think it’s pretty easy to use that password recovery/answer system to get into people’s gmail though. i’ve done it and i’m not smart enough to know what i was doing.
@mmertz: You must be kidding me. AOL Webmail was next to Yahoo the first (out of the big) to offer color skins in Webmail. Why exactly is AOL Webmail the “worst experience”?
Why are you giving Gmail advice on how to overtake Hotmail? Why are you not giving Hotmail advice on how to fend off Gmail?
This kind of blatant, naked bias is what passes as journalism?
How long is it going to take Facebook to catch up in the email wars? MySpace and Facebook should have been focusing on their email system more over the last couple of years.
I think Google and its Gmail could really outdo the competition if they made storing and sharing photos easier. I love Picasa, but with the high resolution cameras of today, you quickly run out of storage and have to create a new Gmail account to get a new Picasa account to share more photos. If I could have one site that stored all of my photos for free, I would never leave it. I would constantly be editing the photos on there for everyone to see, adding locations, comments, etc. If Gmail would increase the storage on Picasa to something like 20 GB (actually I probably need more than that), it would be awesome. It would also have to be free, free, free! =)
Gmail is the best email ever, though. I wish my job would use it. We use some kind of Lotus notes or inotes or something like that, and it is horrible.
Why not pay to upgrade instead of hassling around with all the pictures in multiple places or get a hosting account somewhere?
KM
Wow, I am surprised it took this long!
RT
http://www.onli...nonymity.net.tc
I have a Yahoo account but I had to sign up for it so I could have a Flickr account. For everything else I use Gmail.
I also have a Hotmail account that I deleted a little while ago. But it is being kept for a long time “in case I want to reactivate it”. Which I don’t.
A survey of “active email accounts” would be more useful.
Another lazy fellow, who needs a reading assignment.
Read the posts and you will find the answer.