Came across a report from the Radicati Group, a very well-respected market research firm specializing in messaging and collaboration, who says there are currently 1.4 billion (basically the population of China) active email accounts. They project active email users to grow to almost 2 billion by 2011.

Wow. Nice. Also, looks like people and companies are demanding more features from their email platform as well.

Service providers are increasingly requiring reliable commercial e-mail platforms in order to provide feature-rich messaging and collaboration offerings. With aggressive competition and price pressure in the hosted e-mail market, service providers are looking for e-mail platform suppliers to include more features with their products, particularly support for IM, wireless e-mail, VoIP, enhanced security, and Web 2.0 clients, to meet the growing demand from businesses for next-generation messaging and collaboration.

Providing a service that bridges email users and social media sounds like a good place to be right now.