JuxtConsult the online research agency has recently carried out and brand and user acceptance survey in which Gmail has shown significant rise in its user base, emerging as the second most popular email brand in India, behind only Yahoo!. The survey also stated that Gmail shows the best brand momentum (or future market readiness) among existing the email brands.

Sanjay, Director, JuxtConsult, said, “Though Yahoo! still remains the most popularly used email with the new users who are joining the emailing user base, it is Gmail which is becoming the more preferred email among the more experienced email users. Therefore, for Yahoo! the real danger is that in a slow overall Internet usage growth scenario, unless it improves its user retention ratio, it might end up losing more users to Gmail than it may be able to gain from the new email entrants, thereby increasingly slipping in terms of (primary) user share.”

The top findings of the survey are

• 20 per cent new users have joined the email category in the last one year
• 4 per cent new users have joined the category in the last quarter
• 70 per cent of all email users reading email at work.
• An average user spends 182 minutes per usage day from office, 130 minutes from cyber cafés and 78 minutes from home.
• 47 per cent of all email users come from the top eight metro cities. 
• 40 per cent are spending more than two hours per usage day on emailing.
• Average email account ownership is 3.4.
• ‘Active accounts’ average at only 2.
• 85 per cent of all email users own a mobile phone
• 41 per cent have an email access feature in their phone.
• 21 per cent use mobiles phone to download emails (with only 3 per cent doing so on a regular basis).

JuxtConsult had conducted the online survey in November-December 2006 among a sample base of over 1,950 Internet users.

Even Techcrunch recently compared the three email providers Yahoo!, Gmail and Windows Live and came up with the following chart:

 I personally use Gmail because i can use 2154 MB (77%) of my 2815 MB available on gmail and dont have to bother about deleting any email! Also features like staring each email and viewing emails like conversations helps in better communication.

Source: Exchange4media & Techcrunch