Zimbra Tops Gmail with 40 Million Paid E-mail Accounts

Whether or not you use free e-mail hosting or host your own e-m ail, I think it’s fairly impossible nowadays to use the Internet and not check your e-mail account fairly often. If you happen to use a free service, chances are that it’s either Yahoo!, Hotmail or Gmail, each which currently host millions of e-mail accounts. Currently, Yahoo! has an incredibly demanding lead in overall accounts, at 92.5 million, while Hotmail sits in second, and Gmail in fourth.

If you’re wondering why Gmail is not third, it’s because a little e-mail service called Zimbra (don’t worry, I’ve never heard of it either) just announced that they’ve hit the 40 million mark, which is in all “accounts” impressive. Here’s the kicker… Zimbra is a paid service only, which makes the number even more noteworthy. Zimbra offers various services, but the primary is software that businesses install on their own servers for use.

One of the reasons Zimbra’s numbers experienced a recent surge was thanks to Comcast’s decision to begin using the service. How many mailboxes that brought to the server though is unknown, but it’s likely well over 10 million at least. It’s just too bad that this e-mail service isn’t for the regular Joe, because it looks rather robust. If you happen to run your own server and want to give it a try, there’s a community edition of the software that will allow you to take full advantage of what it offers. What you’ll lack will be support, but if you are techy enough, that might not matter.

Frankly, it’s a shame that Zimbra ended up with Yahoo, which has 92.5 million mailboxes. Though Zimbra is a standout in the industry, Yahoo’s own strength in consumer e-mail likely keeps Zimbra in second place for resources internally, especially since Zimbra’s enterprise-grade e-mail may not be a tight strategic fit. Zimbra would have been an exceptional match for Apple or Adobe with their design-savvy customer bases.