Patlolla

The popularity of Gmail in India cannot be denied, but even we were a bit surprised by a new report that stated it has already gone past Yahoo! Mail as the country’s most preferred email service.

LiveMint is reporting that Internet user measurement and analytics platform agency ViziSense is crowning Gmail as the numero uno email service, ending Yahoo! Mail’s 10-year reign at the top.

According to the agency, the number of unique users of Yahoo! Mail dropped from 18.2 million in August to 16.8 million in September – a decline of 8 per cent. Meanwhile, Gmail gained 3 per cent in traffic to go to 18.2 million unique users in September, surpassing its rival by 1.4 million users.

Trailing the two close competitors are Rediff Mail, MSN Mail and In.com mail, in that order, reports ContentSutra. In September, Rediff Mail had 6.25 million unique users, while MSN Mail had 4.11 million and In.com mail had 0.84 million unique users.

ViziSense puts the reason behind the shift at the top on the increasing popularity of the Google brand strengthening Gmail’s image.

“The launch of Gmail in eight Indian languages was a positive step in this direction,” said Vinay Goel, head of products, Google India, stressing on local content to be the factor that took them ahead.

While Yahoo declined to comment on the ranking, it will be interesting to see what the figures are like in a couple of months since the company has started a massive advertising campaign just last week.