There has been a lot of talk about Facebook launching their own email service next week. The buzz is already so high that the new “Facebook Mail” is touted to be the Gmail-killer. With Google omnipresent in our internet lives, it may be easily assumed that Gmail is the biggest email service provider at present and the tag “Gmail-killer” for Facebook’s email service could make it look like the service could immediately topple Gmail to get to the top of the table.

But the ground reality is pretty different. Gmail is not the biggest email service provider yet. It never was. A post here on Tech Crunchies last year put Gmail at number 5 in the American market. How are things now? Here are the numbers

1. Yahoo Mail : 72.8 million
2. Hotmail : 48.5 million
3. Gmail : 25.1 million
4. Inbox.com : 7.4 million
5. Me.com : 3.1 million
6. Outlook.com : 1.9 million

Interestingly, the study does not include MySpace and AOL Mail in the list. Ironically, these two services were at number 2 & 4 respectively in the list made last year. Wonder what happened to them!

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