Whoa: It's 2012, and the World's Most Popular Email Service Is ... Hotmail

To me this isn't a surprise. It's anecdotal, but the majority of my social circle have hotmail emails. Followed by gmail and then Yahoo. So yeah, based on my experiences I would have assumed Hotmail is the most popular.

From the article: "Microsoft's Hotmail was the most popular Internet-based email service globally as of May, with about 325 million unique visitors. Yahoo's service ranked second, with roughly 298 million users, while Google's Gmail garnered about 289 million users."

Notice the problem here? Maybe it's just an error on the part of the author, but if they're comparing "unique visitors" of hotmail.com to the published number of users of the other services, that's an apples to oranges comparison.

Also making this survey a little useless is the fact that many people are like me: I have a hotmail account from the olden days, and several years ago, I set it to forward to my Google Apps account, and it's probably going to stay that way until Microsoft goes out of business. So I'm listed as a hotmail user, even though I rarely give it much attention, and use Google Mail as my everyday tool.

Nevertheless, it's a catchy headline, and a good example of a platform long tail. Even though hotmail's sexy days are a decade or more in the past, it remains relevant because it's sticky, and even trend chasers like me continue to "use" it because my old hotmail address is still out there and continues to get mail.

I have both a gmail and hotmail accounts and I use Hotmail because it works, gets less spam, and I think google knows enough about me as it stands. Gmail does have a nicer interface but that's about it IMO.

Everytime I try to close my hotmail account I get an error from the website and give up.

We recently ran a pilot with some students from our 13 thousand student base. Our reports show: 69% Hotmail; 13% Yahoo!; 10% Gmail.