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Gmail Takes Largest Webmail Service Crown
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?
First in, First out. Cya, hotmail.
But maybe 1:100 people I know use hotmail. Simply, no one does. Hell, there are probably more AOL active email addresses in my address book compared to Hotmail.
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.
I just remember back in the day how hard it was to POP3 Hotmail. So I never used it. I have several GMAIL accounts for several years, that I use fetchmail on and then host on a private IMAP server. But to be honest i can't remember the last time I received or sent ligitament email to a hotmail address.
... 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?
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
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.
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BMO - Lumber Cartel member #2501
I dunno, maybe the fact of requiring a gmail account to setup an android phone has something to do with it maybe?
I still run my own mail server... Don't forget that under the stored communications act the government can get any emails stored by a third party for more than 6 months with no need for a warrant.
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the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
Unfortunately, not many entities are better than that these days. Royally fucking up perfectly-good UIs is all the rage right now.
...but have two Gmail accounts for other purposes. I have a TW Business Class account for QOS and trading response. It comes with a static IP and no server restrictions. When my neighbors complain about slow evening and weekend speed, I bob my head up and down and make sympathetic noises. I never see any problem but certainly do pay for it.
Several acquaintances still have Hotmail addresses but a quick scan of my address book only found three. I guess it is diminishing. It seems like they were a lot more common a few year ago.
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
-- Pablo Picasso
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.
Google announced it had about 350 million monthly active users in January.
Of which a sizable fraction are spambots.
Centralization of almost every service onto just a few commercial services is dangerous to the future openness and non-censored nature of the internet. We just haven't seen it yet on a big enough scale. It's too much all in one place.
The original purpose of the internet was very much the opposite of centralization, and it was that way for many years with great success... but for some reason, everyone suddenly decided to give a single company access to all their private, financial, and even medical conversations, web browsing, and more.
You won't have better service with Hover. I haven't tried their domain services, but I have used their email services, and they're famous for having week-long outages.
Gmail's labels are easy; think of them like folders, except that you can put a single email into multiple folders. They even have hierarchies set up now, so your labels can be nested like: Work, Work/CompanyA, Work/CompanyB, Work/CompanyA/CustomerA, etc.
Yeah, nowadays spammers have a much easier job, they just send you "trojan.zip", and say "here's your photos from tokyo last night". People still download it and and run it.
As long as people unwilling to use their brain exists, spammers will always find a way to exploit them.
and I'm not ashamed to say it. The pay service ( I think its still 20 a year) has very good spam detection and its online gui is quite similar to a desktop client. I primarily use gmail, but I still do hop back into hotmail for password resets or to look up old receipts.
I read that it depends on whether or not you are logged in. You have to log out before posting anonymous. Posting logged-in-anonymous is not good enough.
testing out my trending skills
...then post anonymously to reverse it.
I gave up spamfighting as a hobby
All but a few noble souls have. The rest who run mailservers set up spamassassin to auto-update rules and go on to other tasks.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Nice opinion, but I cannot stand Gmail's crap interface. Why do some features use icons and others use labels? Why can't the commands be near each other or even on the same menu? Why have a gear icon for settings and when you put you cursor over it is says "Settings" in a label that is exactly the same size as the button? Why the mouseover? Why not make the settings button say "Settings?" And the mouseovers for emails hang on the screen too long. It's like I need to activate a second mouseover to get rid of the first mouseover! For a while they didn't even have a pull down arrow on my account name for account settings. I just had to guess that it was a menu. Oh, and their icons look like shit. What the fuck is that, an umbrella? All the cool features cannot make up for lack of usability. That site needs a weed-whacker taken to it. Don't get me started on targeted advertising. Gmail is great because the service is rarely down and they allow me to use pretty much all standard email protocols to access it. You can keep the web interface. For one of the companies I run I set them up with MDaemon. Awesome anti-spam and a killer web client. I even like Horde, SquirrelMail, and RoundCube better than Gmail, and they are not so great either.
This is indeed true, although the moderator FAQ makes no mention of it anymore. An oversight that shall be rectified.
HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
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.
The FAQ is better left as it is - a trap for those with ill will.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
With Facebook creating email addresses for all of its 700 million+ users, does that not immediately make Facebook the largest webmail service?
I bought myname.com about ten years ago, but it forwards to whatever project of mine I feel is most important at the time, i don't use it for email. For that, I use an email address I set up on a domain I got in '97 (and access that through gmail's web interface now). I ran my own server for a decade before realizing google would do it for me, and save me all sorts of problems.
Good set of postfix rules and a very mild tweaking of Spamassassin and I have nearly no spam reach my inbox.
smtpd_client_restrictions = permit_mynetworks,
reject_unknown_client_hostname,
reject_unauth_pipelining,
check_client_access pcre:/etc/postfix/reject-domains,
permit
smtpd_helo_restrictions = permit_mynetworks,
check_helo_access pcre:/etc/postfix/nomail-domains,
check_helo_access mysql:/etc/postfix/reject-helo-mydomains.cf,
reject_invalid_helo_hostname,
reject_non_fqdn_helo_hostname,
permit
smtpd_sender_restrictions = permit_mynetworks,
check_sender_access pcre:/etc/postfix/nomail-domains,
check_sender_access mysql:/etc/postfix/reject-sender-mydomains.cf,
reject_non_fqdn_sender,
reject_unknown_sender_domain,
permit
smtpd_recipient_restrictions = permit_mynetworks,
reject_unauth_destination,
check_recipient_access pcre:/etc/postfix/reject-users,
Adult Role Playing Forum
Instead of fixing the faq, why not fix the problem? Add a "undo moderation" button next to any posts you have moderated.
Currently we have a considerable number of "resetting moderation" posts that just serve to spam threads.
We are talking about accessing Hotmail via POP3, not Gmail. Hotmail doesn't support IMAP.
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.
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.
It's easy to abuse undoable moderation. Mod something you disagree with up, wait for it to get 2-3 overrated mods, and then undo it. Rather than making it easy to undo moderation, they should fix the terrible zero-click UI for moderating, so that you need to confirm that you did select the correct post and that you did actually mean that moderation. Or make moderation take a minute to be propagated to the database and allow undo only in this time. A simple finger slip can change the moderation from insightful to troll (or vice versa).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
But is there anybody that really cares THAT MUCH to go through all that trouble? I mean seriously, is there anything that is gonna be THAT earth shaking posted here? if you just post honestly frankly the mods even themselves out and you'll have decent karma, the only thing I would change (other than as you said fix the whole zero click problem) is to make sure that a mod doesn't keep going after a single user, just to make sure they are actually moderating and not attacking a single user because of some sort of grudge. After all if its a truly shitty post somebody else will mod it down, no need for one mod to keep hitting the same user unless there is some sort of a vendetta thing going on. i would have it that if they modded the same user twice in X number of days they would get a heads up and if they continued to go after that user then they wouldn't get any mod points ever again. Oh and maybe have a limit on number of accounts by IP, as crazy sock puppety like Mikey 500 accounts is a little too damned obvious.
As for TFA, I thought Yahoo Mail was the biggest, did MSFT somehow get credit for the Yahoo users when they did the search deal? I can tell you here at the shop that Yahoo mail and Yahoo messenger seem to be the most popular with customers by a pretty large margin, just as the number 1 start page? That damned Yahoo portal. While i think its the most cluttered mess I've ever seen users seem to love that crap, they use it like they used to use the daily paper, checking headlines, weather, hell even their horoscopes if they are into that.
In the end as long as we have choice? i honestly don't care who is #1. so congrats Google, don't really like your mail UI (I only use it for a public email address since it does have killer spam filtering) but so long as we have choices I'm happy for you.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I pay for my email now, because I want to be someone's customer, not someone's product
Fastmail is great. No ads, a decent Web UI when I want it, and a dedicated sysadmin team that does nothing but mail. All the Bayesian filtering, Sieve rules and DKIM signing you could want. Plus, I keep my conversations and business dealings out of Google's maw (although it's hard to avoid people who use GMail), and there's Yubikey authentication for when I'm on someone else's machine.
fastmail.fm (full disclosure: referral link included)
I have administered mail servers professionally before and have quite a bit of experience with it. If I'm not being paid to do it I'm sure as hell paying someone else to deal with the hassle.
It was 2001. I was working for an isp in the midwest, in the noc. Start seeing '/var/spool/mail ballooning out of control, filling up the f@#$ partition' errors coming from a mail server in Idaho. Login to machine to investigate, see that approximately 40 users of a common domain (hosted domain for email) had forwarded a 9MB .avi not only to everyone that shared their domain, but several other local users who also began spamming people with this thing. It was that damned video of the guy fishing for salmon that gets in a fistfight with a bear.
they should fix the terrible zero-click UI for moderating
Technically, it's one click to open the menu, and one click to select the moderation ;)
I agree 100% though with the rest, though. There needs to be a temporary undo feature or an actual submit button after you select the appropriate modifier.
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.