Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. These three companies rule webmail with Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo Mail, the three largest email services on the Internet.

What might escape a lot of people, though, is just how important email services are for the online presence of those companies (yes, even for Google). To give you an idea, let’s look at some rather interesting website traffic numbers.

Webmail share of site traffic

Alexa can give you an estimate of how many people visit various parts of a website, or to be precise, which subdomains are visited the most.

• Gmail uses the subdomain mail.google.com.
• Hotmail uses the subdomain mail.live.com.
• Yahoo Mail uses the subdomain mail.yahoo.com.

And here is the data from Alexa, showing how much of each site’s traffic is made up of webmail.

In other words:

• Gmail gets 23% of the traffic to Google.com.
• Hotmail gets 39% of the traffic to Live.com.
• Yahoo Mail gets 20% of the traffic to Yahoo.com.

The actual percentages aren’t really all that important here. What’s important to note is that the subdomains used for webmail have a ranking near or at the top for all three companies.

Imagine the hit to their web presence if they didn’t have these webmail services.

Actual user numbers

Once again, we’re going to have to make do with estimates, because there simply is no official, public data on exactly how many users these webmail services have. We’ll turn to a source we’ve found helpful in the past: Google Doubleclick Ad Planner. It provides worldwide traffic estimates for a lot of sites.

According to Doubleclick Ad Planner:

• Yahoo Mail has 340 million users worldwide.
• Hotmail has 450 million users worldwide.

Those numbers are monthly unique visitors to mail.yahoo.com and mail.live.com.

Unfortunately, we can’t do the same with Gmail, because it’s one of the sites omitted by Ad Planner (which includes some, but not all, Google services).

However, Gmail is considered to be the third largest webmail service. There are estimates placing it around 200 million users worldwide. So it should be somewhere between that and the 340 million user mark we saw for Yahoo Mail.

It should be said that these are stats from just one source. Others have somewhat different numbers, for example Comscore. What you rarely get to see, though, are worldwide numbers. That’s one of the reasons we really like Doubleclick Ad Planner.

That said, regardless of what source you’re looking at, we are talking about hundreds of millions of email users.

That’s right, email isn’t dead yet

Email has been declared dead several times over the past few years. The truth, however, is that we still depend on it more than most people realize, and there is no replacement in sight.

Google knows this. Microsoft knows this. Yahoo knows this. They know that their email services are still extremely important.

And lets not forget all the intangible benefits they get from having a ton of email users and email traffic pass through their systems:

• It’s a statistics goldmine.
• It’s a platform they can keep building on.
• It’s a platform where they can recruit users to other internal services (like Google tried to do with Buzz, for example).

Now imagine if one of these three companies would somehow lose their webmail service. It would be a disaster for them. There would then be hundreds of millions of users who would turn somewhere else for email.

So if you’re one of those people saying email is dead, you probably don’t work at Google, Microsoft or Yahoo…

Do you live in a country that loves Apple’s iPad? Most of us probably think we do, but we wanted to be able to tell you for sure. So even though we have written about the iPad many times before, it’s now time for us to tackle this hotly contested topic again.

Read on to find out, which countries are the most iPad-friendly.

Perhaps you live in one of them.

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Display resolutions are increasing every year, something that’s being taken to its extreme with the recent “retina display” trend that came with the latest iPad. The jump in onscreen pixels is massive, and such displays are soon bound to make their way into regular laptops and desktop displays, perhaps as soon as this year.

This development will have a profound effect on the size of the graphics resources necessary for websites, which ultimately will make websites bigger, more bloated and slower to download. That is, if we don’t change tactics.

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The juggernaut that is Facebook is quickly approaching 1 billion users, so the social network is growing at a rapid pace overall.

But if we look at some of the latest figures available, it would seem that Zuckerberg’s creation is not gaining users in every corner of the world.

In fact, in one country, Facebook has lost 16% of its users over the last six months, the equivalent of over 200,000 users. But in another country, Facebook has gained almost 17 million users over the same period.

What countries are we talking about, you ask? Read on and we’ll tell you.

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Developers who want a portable computer to code on, which is thin, light, sleek and yet powerful, may now be getting another option in an ultrabook from Dell. What makes the “Sputnik” ultrabook different is that it runs Ubuntu 12.04 Linux and it’s tailor-made for developers.

Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, security, and other geeky topics.

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“Photograph what is close to you. Share it with the world!“ That’s one of the headlines on Aday.org, a global project that will attempt to document what goes around the world in one day.

This all takes place on Tuesday May 15, 2012, and Pingdom will be participating.

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