AOL’s email also appears to be holding its own with its user numbers, while Gmail is increasing its number of users but lagging behind other web-mail providers in how often users check mail and how much time they spend on the site.

Among the findings:

Yahoo leads in email users, with 88.4 million in August 2008, according to comScore. Microsoft’s Windows Live Hotmail has 45.2 million users, AOL has 44.8 million, and Google’s Gmail has 26.0 million.

Yahoo mail users spend the most time (286 minutes/month) reading their email, Gmail users spend the least (82 minutes), with AOL and Microsoft in the middle (229 and 204 minutes, respectively).

Google users check their email the least - 13.6 times on average in August, while Yahoo users visited 18.8 times. AOL and Microsoft fall between these two.

In terms of total minutes spent reading email on each of the web-mail services, users spent 25 billion minutes in August on Yahoo mail. They spent 10 billion minutes on AOL mail, 9 billion on Microsoft’s mail, and 2 billion on Gmail.

comScore’s numbers also show that AOL is performing worse than Yahoo and MSN in what is a stagnant portal arena, Hansell said.

AOL’s audience of 110.6 million users is down 3% from last year, while its rivals grew slightly. The average number of minutes spent per user on the AOL portal declined 22%, while time on MSN fell 11%. Yahoo’s average time rose, though only a small amount.

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