Gmail Has 350 Million Users, Closing in on Hotmail to Become No. 1

Google+ is not the only Google service growing fast, one of the oldest and most iconic, Gmail, has seen a surge of new users as well. There are now 350 million Gmail users, the company announced during its earnings call, for the fourth quarter financial report.

That'sl a lot of growth in a short amount of time. In fact, at this point, Gmail may have overtaken Yahoo as the number two email service in the world and is getting close to Microsoft's Hotmail.

Just like with the Google+ numbers though, there is caveat, Google is reporting registered user numbers not active ones. Some of those 350 million users may have abandoned their accounts after creating them. What's more, it seems that Google is creating a Gmail account for every new Google account created, skewing the numbers even more.