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The loyalty of e-mail users has been cited as one of the reasons why Google still only comes forth in the ranking of the UK's e-mail providers, with 1.7 million users - compared with the leader Hotmail's 11.8 million. Google entered the market several years behind Google and has found it tough to lure users away from other sites.

E-mail is also regarded as one of the fundamental pillars of e-commerce by Wall Street analysts - alongside internet search and online video.

"If Yahoo! doesn't continue to innovate in e-mail, somebody else will, and they'll lose that audience," Jordan Rohan, an RBC Capital Markets analyst in New York, said.

There are more than 27 million active e-mail addresses in the UK - not counting work accounts, according to NetRatings.

Now, as many as 60 billion e-mails are sent every day across the globe, according to IDC, the researchers. By contrast, the Royal Mail delivers a third as many items - per year.

However, many believe e-mail's blessings have been mixed: one recent study suggested that the average UK worker will spend 3.5 years of their life dealing with "irrelevant e-mail".

In the second half of last year, according to Ironport, the spam filtering company, more than nine out of every ten e-mails were unsolicited junk - or spam.

Webmail: head-to-head

Yahoo! Mail

E-mail is one of Yahoo!’s many web offerings, but one that helps to ensure a constant supply of repeat visitors to the company’s sites.

Number of users: 254 million (Source: comScore)

Capacity: unlimited

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