Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and Windows Live Hotmail are the three most popular web based email services around but which is the largest of them all?
The last public stats, released by Comscore in September 2010, suggested that Hotmail had 362 million users, Yahoo! Mail had 273 million while Google’s Gmail was a distant third with 193 million users.
The figures would however be a lot different an year later.
MailChimp, the email marketing company that delivers around 2 billion emails per month, including this blog’s newsletter, analyzed the webmail domains of all their outgoing mail traffic and the results reflect quite an interesting*, if not very surprising, pattern.
Hotmail is still the king among web email providers but Gmail is quickly catching up – in fact the volume of email messages (~249.2m) that were sent to the gmail.com domain in July 2011 was very close to the Hotmail volume (~250.8m). Yahoo Mail isn’t growing at the same rate as the other two services.
The MailChimp numbers do not represent the actual user base of the various email providers but if we look at them relatively, they do give an idea of the overall trend.
[*] MailChimp uses double opt-in before adding any email address to their database and thus the numbers should mostly represent active email addresses.
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