Hotmail is finally overtaken by Gmail

According to their traffic data for October, Google’s email service has finally overtaken Hotmail with 287.9 million unique worldwide visitors during the month versus 286.2 million for Hotmail.

Google had already claimed the top spot by its own count of over 425 million active users in June 2012, up from 350 million in January. However, these numbers wildly differed from the 289 million reported by comScore at the time. It’s worth noting the research firm doesn’t track mobile usage.

Yahoo Mail ranked third with 281.7 million active users during October. Despite its position in the global market, the latter is still king in the US, with 76.7 million active users versus 69.1 million for Gmail and 35.5 million for Hotmail.

The number of unique visitors to all three email providers is down overall, which GigaOm speculates could be due to the recent introduction of Microsoft’s Outlook and AOL’s (still in closed beta) Alto.

Source: Gigaom