If you ever set out to collect personal email addresses at a tech gathering, here's a tip: generally speaking, you can save time by typing or writing out the "@gmail" part before approaching people.  But Compete provided a bit of a reality check today by showing that Hotmail remains in the top spot overall.

Andrew Pearlman - who is himself a satisfied Hotmail user - wrote earlier, "I am happy to report that MSN Hotmail still holds a slight lead in the number of Unique Visitors over Gmail every month."

It's done so for quite some time, too.  Pearlman continued, "Below is a trend line for the previous 3 years, keep in mind that the domain for hotmail.com has changed over time and in late '07 the sub-domain moved from msn.com to live.com."

Of course, if you eye the July 2009 to September 2009 region of the graph, the odds of Hotmail staying in the lead start to look a little slim.  Nonetheless, if Bing continues to become more successful and Microsoft does a decent job of tying all its products together, it's hard to say what might happen.

At the least, this should be a sign to not give odd ("you're backwards") or rude ("you're blowing me off") looks to people who supply Hotmail addresses.

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