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Comment by jwwest | Hacker News Reader

> Yahoo! Mail is still the #3 most used mail service in the world with Hotmail and Gmail in front of it.

I'd love to see numbers of how many people ACTIVELY use these services and not just total email addresses. Many, many people I know of use Yahoo and Hotmail for spam traps, or set an email address there up long ago and then long ago abandoned it.

Claiming "most used mail service" is either very misleading, or sloppy writing.

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I think this is one of those tech bubble things- everyone we know uses Gmail. But outside of tech circles a great many people still use Hotmail and Yahoo mail. Like my parents.

At least they're not using AOL.

So true! People should stop treating their own little circle as representative of the world.

Yes, I know my mom and many of her friends use Yahoo. (My dad just uses the same university email he's had forever.)

I'm pretty sure she's used it since before gmail even existed. It works for her, why would she switch?

Yea, same with my in-laws & other relatives. In the regular world, Yahoo Mail works just fine for plenty of people.

While most of the people I know use gmail, Yahoo mail is a fairly close second. It tends to be among the less technically sophisticated, but they really use it.

I like how you ask for data to verify it (which is totally valid) and then make a definitive statement (or options). Yahoo could definitely be #3 in active use, just like AOL still has tons of users and XP has a large install base. I know of many small businesses that use Yahoo for stores and web hosting (though it is generally an awful experience) because they have business processes around them, and changing those processes is hard and expensive.

Almost nothing wrong with Windows XP, which is more than can be said for the current version of Windows.

On the other hand I am not sure that Yahoo is particularly awful - I use it as a garbage account for trashy site registering, and my father uses it for his main email for which it works perfectly well.

Better than this hideous new interface hotmail has foisted on me, and which is the main reason I am actually going to make the switch to Gmail.

XP has significant security issues compared to Winows 7/8. In addition it has lots of clunky UI that has been cleaned up in 7/8.

I believe that both Yahoo and Hotmail are frequently used outside of the US, especially in Asia.

A very biased sample from my address book (which mostly contains active e-mails - I periodically clean it out of stale addresses):

* gmail: 220

* something.edu: 30

* yahoo: 14

* hotmail: 12

* aol: 0

From UK mailing lists run off a system I manage, for us Hotmail makes up about 50%, with Gmail and Yahoo fighting for the second spot, based on a (self-selected) sample of 1.5 million+ subscribers across the lists.

And yes, these are mostly active users - we see no statistically significant difference in engagement levels between the major webmail services.

Gmail only thoroughly dominates amongst techies. Regular users largely either don't care, or very often active prefer the "Outlook style" interface of Hotmail or Yahoo.

The rankings are generally based on website traffic, not email addresses.

For instance, Comscore: http://gigaom.com/2012/10/31/gmail-finally-beats-hotmail-acc...

I have 1 yahoo, 4-5 gmail and about the same in Outbox /Hotmail addresses.

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