> Yahoo! Mail is still the #3 most used mail service in the world with Hotmail and Gmail in front of it.
I'd love to see numbers of how many people ACTIVELY use these services and not just total email addresses. Many, many people I know of use Yahoo and Hotmail for spam traps, or set an email address there up long ago and then long ago abandoned it.
Claiming "most used mail service" is either very misleading, or sloppy writing.
I think this is one of those tech bubble things- everyone we know uses Gmail. But outside of tech circles a great many people still use Hotmail and Yahoo mail. Like my parents.
While most of the people I know use gmail, Yahoo mail is a fairly close second. It tends to be among the less technically sophisticated, but they really use it.
I like how you ask for data to verify it (which is totally valid) and then make a definitive statement (or options). Yahoo could definitely be #3 in active use, just like AOL still has tons of users and XP has a large install base. I know of many small businesses that use Yahoo for stores and web hosting (though it is generally an awful experience) because they have business processes around them, and changing those processes is hard and expensive.
Almost nothing wrong with Windows XP, which is more than can be said for the current version of Windows.
On the other hand I am not sure that Yahoo is particularly awful - I use it as a garbage account for trashy site registering, and my father uses it for his main email for which it works perfectly well.
Better than this hideous new interface hotmail has foisted on me, and which is the main reason I am actually going to make the switch to Gmail.
From UK mailing lists run off a system I manage, for us Hotmail makes up about 50%, with Gmail and Yahoo fighting for the second spot, based on a (self-selected) sample of 1.5 million+ subscribers across the lists.
And yes, these are mostly active users - we see no statistically significant difference in engagement levels between the major webmail services.
Gmail only thoroughly dominates amongst techies. Regular users largely either don't care, or very often active prefer the "Outlook style" interface of Hotmail or Yahoo.
I'd love to see numbers of how many people ACTIVELY use these services and not just total email addresses. Many, many people I know of use Yahoo and Hotmail for spam traps, or set an email address there up long ago and then long ago abandoned it.
Claiming "most used mail service" is either very misleading, or sloppy writing.