Gmail Takes Largest Webmail Service Crown 383
redletterdave writes "After several years of dominance, Microsoft's Web-based email service, Hotmail, has been unseated by Google's significantly younger webmail service, Gmail. Google announced it had about 350 million monthly active users in January; since then, that number has ballooned to 425 million."
Remember when people ran their own mail servers?
Own email server (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember when people ran their own mail servers?
I do, because I still run my own, as plenty of power-users do. Of course, the masses never ran their own e-mail servers, even before webmail, they just used POP3 or IMAP.
Re:Maybe selection bias (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, the main difference is that AOL is US only, while hotmail had a lot of worldwide users. I must know about 45% hotmail, 45% gmail, and 10% "all the rest". I'm guessing that's pretty much how modern distribution goes as well.
Re:Maybe selection bias (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Own email server (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh lots of people probably would still run their own, even on their home internet connections if they could. Unfortunately, most ISP's no longer allow people to run servers.
POP3 access. (Score:5, Insightful)
Hotmail was great... (Score:5, Insightful)
... before Microsoft bought it. It used to run on Unix and was a good reliable service. Then it was bought up and run down and now it is rubbish. Gmail is getting better every week. I use docs to collaborate with people on things and even though I know most of them copy and paste the finished article into Word before they print it, that facility is fantastic. My calendar etc. and spreadsheets, I could go on (POP3 etc.) but my point is that while one keeps getting more useful the other is stagnant. Why would anyone choose to use Hotmail unless they are already known to be there?
Yeah, I remember. It was a pain. (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember when people ran their own mail servers?
Yeah, I do. I also remember relay rape and all that fun stuff when you didn't have your mail server configured just right and a spammer would take it over and you'd get a nastygram from your provider.
--
BMO - Lumber Cartel member #2501
Re:Maybe selection bias (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree with this. I've been running a very small internet business for a few years now, and have about 1000 customers so far; out of those 1000, about 150 have hotmail.com addresses, while only about 40 have aol.com addresses. The customers aren't really computer experts either, so it's a crowd where I'm not surprised to have AOL users, but still, there's lots more hotmail users. In fact, there's actually more hotmail users than Yahoo users, of which there's about 120. Not surprisingly, Gmail tops the list, at over 230. The rest is things like comcast.net (a little over 30, close to the aol.com number in fact), roadrunner.com, etc. along with some business email addresses and various other ISPs, large and small.
Re:Hotmail was great... (Score:2, Insightful)
Gmail is NOT "getting better every week". It hit its peak about a year or so ago, before they forced this idiotic new UI change on us.
Re:Classic interface? (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, not many entities are better than that these days. Royally fucking up perfectly-good UIs is all the rage right now.
Gmail defeated Exchange, not Hotmail (Score:5, Insightful)
Hotmail didn't even deserve the level of use it had: it was competing with AOL, and had the kind of ubiquitous "auto-installed with your computer as as default, and we'll keep trying to re-install it" that AOL used to have. Both services attempted to replace the rest of your desktop and were unusable without very specific clients.
Google's approach of working well, inside your normal web browsers, has been extremely effective. They've also been vastly more reliable than almost any in-house mail server for a lot of reasons: they were able to effectively implement basic spam filtering, they're big enough to survive denial of service attacks, and their distributed and well scaled architectures survive disasters most mail servers can only imagine being able to cope with. Also, they've avoided the religious wars about supported clients and usage models by keeping their systems off-site and their services well defined. The Exchange OWA, and the dozens of "plug-ins" connected to it to support other email clients, have driven people directly to GMail.
Hotmail, and Exchange, _never_ worked well with non-Microsoft clients, whether browsers or IMAP access. Google always did, Google always actually published and followed their API's so other people could integrate with it, and Microsoft _never_ published or followed their own API's. What little Microsoft published was always incomplete when it was not a blatant lie.
Google's use of and investment in open standards paid off.
Re:Hotmail was great... (Score:4, Insightful)
Gmail is NOT "getting better every week". It hit its peak about a year or so ago, before they forced this idiotic new UI change on us.
Just wanted to second this. If I could go back to the way it was a year ago I'd be happy. I'm also tired of the Gmail Labs kludges that add functionality and break something somewhere else. (like the preview pane that makes it so I can no longer see the 'recent activity' at the bottom of the screen.)
I wouldn't be offended if they took what they know about it now and did a rewrite, thoughtfully including a number of the features from Labs. Do a little streamlining, reduce some of the bloat, all that jazz. Oh well, I can dream.
Re:Maybe selection bias (Score:5, Insightful)
Judging by my own defunct hotmail account, I wouldn't want to do that. So much spam.
But it'd all get run through Gmail's spam filters, so you wouldn't actually see it.
Re:Own email server (Score:5, Insightful)
LOL. The one thing Google does NOT do is protect your data. To protect your data, you keep it to yourself, you don't let Google/FBI/CIA/TSA/MAFIAA/Obama snoop it up and either censor it or take it hostage etc.
American corporations are a terrible place to store your data, unless "you have nothing to hide".
Re:Own email server (Score:5, Insightful)
That would only be true if you send all encrypted email to only people using private, encrypted servers. Since the rest of us live in the real world where our friends and family use large webmail services, it really doesn't make a difference.
Re:'Replying to undo moderation mistake. Sorry, pa (Score:5, Insightful)
Currently we have a considerable number of "resetting moderation" posts that just serve to spam threads.
Re:hunh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Same here. I've had my own domain since 1999. Over the years I've had mail provided by a number of services (at one point having it hosted on a server under my desk at home). When Google Apps came out (in what, 2006?) I switched to them and have been with them since.
I get enormous amounts of spam (these days it's around 4,000 messages a month. A few years ago it was in the 30,000-40,000/month range.) so dealing with spam filtering was a massive hassle. Gmail's filters are outstanding, and maybe 1-2 spams slip through per month. They're usually novel attempts to avoid filtering and are quickly blocked. Google's trivial "mark this message as spam" button makes things quite easy. The support for IMAP, POP, and Exchange ActiveSync is nice too, as is their XMPP support (both with a separate client and their web-based one). I'm a heavy user of email (but routinely delete rather than archive messages) and am only using about 5% of the total storage space allocated to me as a free user.
Gmail's also been doing quite well on the security front: their accounts support two-factor authentication using open standards and their service defaults to using HTTPS (with ephemeral ECDH key exchange, no less!).
My parents, who are not very technical people, have used Gmail for years and have been quite satisfied. I'm pleased that the system choses sane defaults to help keep them secure.
Sure, I *could* set up and run my own email server, but why bother? High availability costs money and time, servers are not cheap, I'd have to pay for electricity/network connectivity for an underutilized system, and I'd have to constantly be fending off spammers and other baddies. I'd rather use my time to do something else that's more productive.
Re:there's a middle ground too (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with this approach is that it ties you to your ISP. When you move or they get bought in ten years, you have to try to recall EVERYONE who has your email address, and convince them to update their address books.
This. ISP-provided email is a form of vendor lock-in.
Personally, I avoided the issue by buying my own domain years ago and using it for my email. Google Apps provides the backend for it now, but I can switch off them to a different provider (including my own server) within the time it takes for DNS TTLs to expire (24 hours or so) without needing to change my address. Very convenient.
Re:How many are 'bots? (Score:2, Insightful)
Google announced it had about 350 million monthly active users in January.
Of which a sizable fraction are spambots. [xgcmedia.com]
Notice how you have to pay 19 times as much per account for the gmail accounts compared to all the other accounts. Notice how they don't give the same guarantee about the lifetime of the accounts.
It appears they are not able to open bulk accounts with Gmail like they do with the other providers. And apparently Gmail shuts the accounts down within a few days. Xgcmedia will only guarantee that you are able to use the accounts for 48 hours before they are shut down.
1000 out of 350000000 is not a sizable fraction.
Re:'Replying to undo moderation mistake. Sorry, pa (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Maybe selection bias (Score:4, Insightful)
Why on earth does the government need to be running not one, but two luxury car companies, for instance? (And one of those isn't just any luxury car company, it's probably one of the two most outrageously expensive makes on earth.)
Rolls Royce were a company that made both luxury cars and military-grade aircraft parts. They were nationalised as a whole when they went bust in the 70s due to the need to keep the military gear flowing; the car brand was immediately separated off and sold. The aircraft-part manufacturer stayed on the public books for a couple of decades before being sold off again. The two are still separate to this day.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_plc [wikipedia.org]
My view on nationalisation versus privatisation has always been: if it's too big or important to fail, it has to be state owned. Otherwise the state is only underwriting the company anyway. The current Tory government is looking to sell off the Royal Mail; this would mean that in any year where they make a profit, some shareholders will get to keep that money as a dividend. But if the Royal Mail makes huge losses and heads towards bankruptcy, you can be damned sure the government will bail them out; the country without a postal system is unimaginable. So all they'll have done is privatise the profits, nationalised the losses. Ridiculous.