In September of last year I covered the race for your mail. At the time Gmail had just passed AOL for the third place position among the leaders and there was speculation that the then new and still popular Gmail program would continue to gain ground on the leaders.
Here’s an excerpt and chart from last year:
“The echoing sound of “You’ve Got Mail” faded this summer as Google’s Gmail powered past AOL and captured the third place position among email servers.
With a growth rate of 46% over the past year some are saying Gmail will overtake Windows Live Mail/HotMail at the number 2 position by early in 2010. Possibly even as early as Feb. 2010.“
| Leader Board | ||||||
| Position | Name | Traffic | Movement | |||
| Win | Yahoo Mail | 106 Million | Up 22% | |||
| Place | Windows Live | 47 Million | Holding | |||
| Show | Gmail | 37 Million | Up 46% | |||
| 4th Place | AOL | 36.4 Million | Dn 19% | |||
Were the projections correct? Did Gmail overtake Windows Live mail by early 2010?
To make a long story short, who knows! That’s right, no one knows. I’m not seeing anything that can be confirmed or figures that compare to what was available last year.
The first thing I noticed while searching for updated information was that there is an obvious absence of reporting from my previous sources, ComScore and Netmarketshare. In fact, after two days of searching I ended up going to Hitwise and looking at their statistics for Top 20 Websites & Engines.
Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Windows Live Mail and AOL Mail are there, but the number of hits shown for a website is a far stretch to the number of people using that software as their primary email client.
Extensive reading tells me that Gmail is making huge strides in some areas. ComScore had a December 2009 press release placing Gmail as Brazil’s number 2 email client but that is not necessarily representative of the rest of us.
The figures that are collected by our PC Pitstop servers will only show programs installed on a system. We have no way of knowing which, if any, is actually being used for daily email.
That brings me to our Poll. What email client are you using? AOL / LiveMail / Gmail / Yahoo / Other. Please let us now who you use most.
[poll id=”28″]
I’m also requesting that in addition to participating in our poll, you give me some opinions on what you like and don’t like about the programs that are available. Whether you’ve had trouble finding one you really, really like? Why Gmail blows, that type of thing.
Some of the blogs I’m reading say that email use is declining because of Spam. Social Networking, Twitter, IM, FaceBook and the like are replacing email. Do you think that’s a valid statement?
Thanks and remember it’s an opinion so you can’t be wrong.
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