In June 2012, representatives of Google. Inc announced that the number of active users of the mail service Gmail exceeded 425 million people per month. If these numbers are to be believed, Google Mail seems to have finally managed to overtake its main competitors - Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail - and became the absolute world leader.
Such different statistics
According to the statistics of the ComaScore agency in 2011, the rating of the most popular mail services in the world looked like this (the number of active users per month is indicated):
1. Hotmail - 325 million people;
2. Yahoo! - 298 million people;
3. Gmail - 289 million people.
It is interesting that the long-term leader of the world rating - Hotmail - published its own official statistics a long time ago - in July 2011. Then the owner of this mail service - Microsoft Corporation - announced 360 million monthly active users. Representatives of the world's most popular postal services do not explain the discrepancy between their official calculations and the above studies. Microsoft and Yahoo! refer to ComScore's data as objective, while Google representatives insist on their numbers and declare that they do not intend to discuss statistics from third-party sources.
Gmail in Russia
The Russian-language version of Gmail began functioning in 2005, and unlike Yahoo! and Hotmail fell in love with many users of the Russian Internet. However, the leading positions in the Russian Internet space are still held by the domestic mail services Mail. Ru and Yandex. By the way, even on a global scale, the share of their presence in the e-mail services market is very large. Everything in the same report ComеScore Mail. Ru is in 4th position in the international rating - that is, immediately behind Gmail, and Yandex. Mail - in 8th (12.1 million and 3.9 million people, respectively).
TNS, another reputable statistical agency, gives even more impressive numbers. For the latest reports as part of their regular Web Index research, visit the company's website. Unfortunately, as of June 2012, in these reports, TNS did not list the share of Google's presence in Runet for individual services, providing only general figures. But even according to these figures in Russia, all Google services as a whole in June 2012 managed to attract not much more audience than the mail and internal services Mail. Ru alone - 26 million from Google against 25, 7 million people. at Mail. Ru mail. Yandex mail in the same period was used by 16, 36 million people.
Microsoft is not going to give up without a fight
Since July 31, 2012, a new mail domain from Microsoft Corporation - Outlook.com has appeared on the vastness of the world Internet. While this postal service is in beta testing, but it was its experts that have already been named the main competitor of Gmail in the global market. Moreover, in the future Outlook.com will completely replace the Hotmail.com domain.
Internet users can get acquainted with the new mail service in detail both personally and simply by reading numerous reviews on the network. Immediately after the announcement, millions of people signed up for the new domain. Perhaps, for now, just out of curiosity, time will tell what will happen next. However, even psychologists note that the rebranding alone will already benefit the postal service from Microsoft - in English-speaking countries, the word Hot and its word forms are associated with sites "for adults" and other "strawberries", so use a postal address with the domain ending @hotmail.com has been strongly discouraged in business correspondence for solidity reasons.
Whether the new Outlook.com service will be able to seriously compete with the leaders of the Russian market is a difficult question. The creators of the service, in this sense, have high hopes for the integration with Skype. However, the Russians actively use Skype and its analogues as it is. The high popularity of the social network "My World", projects like "Yandex. Money", etc. also not particularly conducive to the massive transition from Russian postal services to foreign ones. So the competitive struggle of world leaders, rather, denotes trends that should be emphasized by domestic postal services in their development - the widespread use of cloud technologies, free access to a suite of office applications, improvement of messengers and client programs, video communication support, etc.
However, popular mailboxes have long ceased to be just a means of sending and receiving text messages.