Growth? Gmail grew 3 or 4 years ago. I wouldn't recommend Gmail to anyone now, it's just another Hotmail type service, there's nothing special or good about Gmail anymore.
What really surprised me is how few of my friends get the 'conversation' view even in 2012. After too many awkward conversations and now their 'we've got absolutely no design skills and can't design for shit' redesign, I'm just shrugging when people say their hotmail account has been hacked for the 15th time.
I've been using gmail pretty exclusively for the past 4 years now, and haven't really had to much exposure to other services. But I've been extremely satisfied. Enough to stick around.
So just out of curiosity - what services would you recommend to an inquiring mind?
fastmail's non-free service, maybe? I got it a very long time ago, mainly for the .in email address. It's been no-frills, fast, and (mostly) reliable. I'm still not sure I'd recommend it to a gmail user, but its been a good email account to have.
Careful - don't rely on fastmail for XMPP. I switched to them based on them having that, since I used it a lot with Gmail. Then I found out that fastmail is running some super wobbly XMPP server which kicks you off any time you really get going really quickly in a conversation.
I've opened multiple tickets, and all they can say is "sorry" and "we know about it" and "we're working on it", but actual fixes still haven't come. Having a solid chat experience obviously is not high on their priority list.
Late reply, sorry. I never even knew they had the option of an XMPP server. For what it's worth, I find the mail experience to be both reasonable, and pretty much fat-free, which I guess is all I really need.
I moved my domain and imported all emails from Fastmail to Google Apps because of:
1) Deficient search, the more email you keep, the more you rely on search to find something from few days to few years ago. Incredibly painful with Fastmail.
2) Lack of calendar. It's just so more convenient to have your calendar integrated with email.
3) Lack of Exchange ActiveSync support (as in protocol). This protocol allows to sync email, calendar and contacts from the same account. All these things I want to be synced to my phone. Keeping contacts and calendar in Gmail (because it has ActiveSync support) and email in Fastmail was becoming more and more frustrating.
As a publicly traded company, their published estimates of gained users over the past year are probably extremely solid. I wouldn't worry about bias, they would be in heaps of trouble if they lied about these numbers.
What really surprised me is how few of my friends get the 'conversation' view even in 2012. After too many awkward conversations and now their 'we've got absolutely no design skills and can't design for shit' redesign, I'm just shrugging when people say their hotmail account has been hacked for the 15th time.