Good thing Gmail is out of beta. It is now the third largest Web mail service in the U.S. In July, Gmail nudged past AOL Email with 37 million unique visitors compared to 36.4 million for AOL, according to comScore estimates. (Gmail is the orange line in the chart below). That puts Gmail within sight of the No. 2 player, Windows Live Hotmail, which has 47 million unique visitors. After that there is a wide gulf separating Yahoo Mail and its 106 million monthly unique visitors.

Gmail was down for several hours yesterday and since our company uses it as our primary email service (using Google Apps so we can have our own domain name), we were all affected by the outage. But we'll stick with it because it offers by far the best and most efficient email experience. I haven't used Outlook for years and don't miss it at all. I get gmail on my iPhone, Blackberry, and G1 phone.

Actually, this isn't the most important thing I can be blogging about right now, but I am testing Posterous right now, with it's ability to post anything to my WordPress blog at PaulAllen.net, and I just had to find something to highlight somewhere, comment on, and then click Post. So I'm doing that now and will see what happens next.