BBC has an article along similar lines to those I mentioned here.
“If a friend is excited about a concert and that gives me an idea for a birthday gift, I will store the info on e-mail,” says Georges Harik, the man in charge of search-engine Google’s Gmail service.
Stuart Anderson, Microsoft’s Hotmail business manager in the UK, keeps online shopping receipts in his mailbox in case he has to query anything later.
“People are keeping a lot more information in their e-mail accounts for retrieval at a later date,” says Yahoo!
Web-based e-mail services like Hotmail, Yahoo!, Gmail and AOL Mail on the Web are becoming databases by default as a growing number of people use them, to store data and photos so they can retrieve them from anywhere.