While among the techie crew Google Gmail might be all the snitz the often ridiculed Hotmail email service, or as it is called now: Windows Live Hotmail, from Microsoft is still incredibly popular with a lot of people – some 350 million of them.

This is one of the little tidbits that Arthur de Haan, whose responsibilities include Test and System Engineering in Windows Live, included in a post about Windows Live Hotmail today.

Some other of the tidbits include

• We are a worldwide service, delivering localized versions of Hotmail to 59 regional markets, in 36 languages.
• We host well over 1.3 billion inboxes (some users have multiple inboxes)
• Over 350 million people are actively using Hotmail on a monthly basis (source: comScore, August 2009).
• We handle over 3 billion messages a day and filter out over 1 billion spam messages – mail that you never see in your inbox.
• We are growing storage at over 2 petabytes a month (a petabyte is ~1 million gigabytes or ~1000 terabytes).
• We currently have over 155 petabytes of storage deployed (70% of storage is taken up with attachments, typically photos).
• We’re the largest SQL Server 2008 deployment in the world (we monitor and manage many thousands of SQL servers).

So while Gmail is getting all the techie love it seems that Hotmail Windows Live Hotmail just keeps chugging along keeping a lot of people very happy.