E-Mail Goes
International in 2000
By Michael Pastore
For the first
time in the history of the electronic messaging market, there are
more electronic mailboxes outside the United States than within
it, according to Messaging Online.
The "Year-End 2000 Mailbox Report" estimates that the number of
e-mail service subscriptions soared in 2000, up more than 88
percent from the end of 1999 to 514.25 million mailboxes worldwide
at the end of 2000. Growth was much swifter outside the United
States than within it. The number of U.S. mail service subscribers
grew by only 73 percent in 2000, while the number of international
service subscribers increased by 109 percent.
The number of wireless messaging devices soared in the past
year from 3.7 million to 31.8 million devices. The ramp-up would
be even faster if Short Message Service (SMS) devices, of which
there are some 500 million worldwide, were included in the count.
America Online's proprietary e-mail service and Microsoft's
Hotmail service continue to dominate their respective ISP e-mail
and Webmail categories, Messaging Online found. AOL has an 11.4
percent share of 234 million ISP mailboxes and Hotmail has a 30.3
percent share of 280 million Webmail boxes. However, Messaging
Online found some international up-and-coming Internet access
service providers further on down the list: Germany's T-Online,
Terra Lycos in Spain, Tin.it and Tiscali in Italy, BTinternet in
the UK, and Wanadoo in France are among the European ISPs now in
the top 25 worldwide.
The Webmail category has seen extensive growth outside of both
the United States and Europe. SinaMail is the No. 1 Webmail
service in China, and No. 5 worldwide with 11.5 million mailboxes.
Universo Online's UOLmail in Brazil is No. 8 with 7 million
Webmail users. At No. 13 is RediffMail in India, and No.14 is
Taiwan's Kimo Mail. In addition, the big guns of Hotmail and Yahoo
Mail are becoming increasingly multinational. A second wave of
indigenous Webmailers is on the way, where English is the second
language. Same with ISPs, where American-sounding MSN and AOL
strike out against indigenous local providers. Gone are the days
when something like CompuServe led the international markets
simply because there were no local competitors.
Webmail remains a consumer phenomenon, Messaging Online found.
The interfaces are not geared up for heavy mail volumes and other
services that business usage requires. Moving messages, staying
within mailbox limits, and archiving messages are much easier on
POP3 e-mail accounts.
When examining the companies that provide the providers with
e-mail, Messaging Online found that ISPs either 1) built it
themselves from a Sendmail code base; or 2) they bought a platform
from Openwave (Software.com), iPlanet (Sun/Netscape), or Critical
Path (Isocor). If it's a Webmail service, they 1) built it
themselves, or 2) used an outsourcer such as Mail.com or Commtouch
Software.
Worldwide, nearly 250 million of the 514 million service
provider mailboxes have been bought from one of the above. The
rest are do-it-yourself operations such as AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo
Mail, EarthLink, and Lycos Mail/MailCity. Openwave Systems dominates among
those bought from a platform provider with a 38 percent share,
followed by Critical Path with a 23 percent share. However, the
Critical Path installed base is almost evenly divided between
services that Critical Path runs and software that Critical Path
licenses.
The number two player in terms of software licensing to service
providers is iPlanet with a 16 percent share, now that it has
merged its Netscape Messaging Server and Sun Internet Mail Server
product lines. Among the remaining outsourcers, Mail.com has an 8
percent share; Commtouch has 7 percent; and USA.Net has 6 percent.
March 12, 2001
 |
Related
item:
Although the US has seen the Internet reach
gender parity and extend to lower demographics, the
worldwide picture remains quite different, according
to a report by the International Labour Organization,
which found vast areas of the globe to be
"technologically disconnected."
Read Global
Digital Divide Still Very Much in
Existence
| |
