[y4mi]

not sure, to be honest.

thats how it was in my circles until ~05-06. everyone kept switching emails and used a different address on each service/forum. until gmail came along. suddenly everyone used their gmail address for everything. and even that got phased out when facebook came along.

[timje1]

The big difference that I remember from gmail was the superior spam filter (other inboxes filled with spam quickly) and better security (everyone with a yahoo mail account had it compromised and started sending spam / virus laden links after a while).