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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.
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.
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.
I'm pretty sure there are hundreds of thousands of Gmail users who have an old and defunct Hotmail account that they forward to their Gmail account (just in case that high-school sweetheart tries to get back in touch). They will be pushing up the Hotmail count, despite the fact that they aren't active users in any sense.
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.
--
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 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.
I'm surprised Hotmail just lost its crown. It has millions of spam accounts on there.
Either their spam detection just got better, or the spammers themselves are leaving Hotmail because no one takes Hotmail seriously anymore.
Unfortunately, not many entities are better than that these days. Royally fucking up perfectly-good UIs is all the rage right now.
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.
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 can set up Gmail to access your Hotmail account via POP3.
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.
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.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
...then post anonymously to reverse it.
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!
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.
America Online wasn't based in and focused on America?
Indeed not. They were a reasonably significant broadband ISP in the UK too, though their decline here has paralelled that in the USA.
Yes I remember their famous "faux pas", like telling the residents of Scunthorpe that they should rename their town Sconthorpe to register, thinking people from Penistone were taking the piss - there couldn't be a town called that could there?, and telling the Welsh that they has to use English in the Welsh language forum. They even blocked emails in Welsh. Needless to say they were not the biggest ISP in the UK!
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.