According to ComScore, a marketing research company, Gmail is now the third largest email provider in the United States. InformationWeek broke down the numbers, revealing last year Gmail grew a remarkable 46 percent, from 25.3 million to 36.9 million users. Gmail is now on pace to overtake Windows Live Hotmail, at 47.1 million users, in around seven months.
Gmail has continued to grow most likely due to its apps, like Google Docs and Google Calender which take standard desktop applications into the "cloud." Gmail"s growth did not even seem to be slowed by its perpetual beta tag which was just removed earlier this summer.
Yahoo Mail continues to lead the pack when it comes to U.S. email providers with 106.1 million visitors last month. Yahoo offers unlimited storage to users across several different available domain names making it very difficult for competitors to keep up. Yahoo"s continued popularity is likely also due to its media and entertainment portal including sites like Yahoo Sports and OMG which continue to receive more traffic than competitors ESPN and TMZ, respectively. So while it"s likely Gmail will overtake Windows Live Hotmail, Yahoo is apparently not going anywhere.