New York — It is praiseworthy to be able to offer 31.2 million free Gmail accounts, as Google has. Nevertheless, it is even more praiseworthy to get customers to pay for 40 million mailboxes, as Zimbra, the Yahoo-owned email and business software provider, has crossed a new milestone reported last week, representing a sharp change from the 20 million paid mailboxes reported in early 2009.
Zimbra’s crossing the 40 million user mark, is no way a small achievement for a company that charges for email. In fact, according to comScore, Zimbra actually has more monthly unique visitors than Google’s Gmail: 31.4 million to Gmail’s 31.2 million.
According to VentureBeat analysis, Zimbra is now ahead of Gmail in unique mailboxes and only slightly behind Microsoft’s Hotmail service. That is pretty astounding: one little open-source company takes on the two titans of software and wins (against Gmail), or shortly could win (against Hotmail).
Surely, the spike from 20 million to 40 million is probably due to Comcast’s decision to utilize Zimbra for its user e-mail accounts. But in the end it is still impressive.
With flexibility all over the place — right from dragging and dropping contacts to AJAX technology that enables users to schedule appointments directly from an e-mail window, without forcing the launch of a calendar app. On the other hand it is also noteworthy that Zimbra gets along with everyone on the playfield — it works on mobile devices (Blackberry, iPhone and Treo, among others) as well as the Mac, Windows and Linux operating systems. It plays nice with Gmail, Exchange, Outlook, Thunderbird and Apple Mail — and, of course, Yahoo Mail.
VB’s Anthony Ha also mentions that analyzing a consumer-driven Web mail product like Gmail to a more business-oriented product like Zimbra is a bit of “an apples to oranges” comparison, but Zimbra’s surging popularity is impressive, nonetheless (last year, it reported less than 12 million paid mailboxes). Ha also states that much of Zimbra’s growth resulted from a landmark deal it struck with Comcast in 2007. A spokeswoman said the deals with Comcast and other service providers “represent a large number of Zimbra’s user base.”
Yahoo has been in a world of mess for some time but Mail — which is the most-trafficked property in Yahoo’s network of sites — could help bring the company out of this muddle.
Data from Hitwise places Yahoo as the pack-leader for Web-based mail, with 56.46 percent of market share, well above the 19.14 percent of No. 2 Microsoft and 10.82 percent of No. 3 Google.
Zimbra could play a very important role for Yahoo in the coming years and months. As CEO Carol Bartz said recently, email is becoming “increasingly critical” to struggling Yahoo.
Yahoo acquired Zimbra for $350 million in September 2007.