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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.
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 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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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).
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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.