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(CNN) -- Google has been catching heat lately for the fact that it temporarily lost the e-mails of tens of thousands of Gmail users.
But the company has one thing going for it that's not true of competitors: It publishes data about how often its e-mail service goes down.
Microsoft and Yahoo, when contacted by CNN, would not say what percentage of the time their e-mail services are up or down.
This information could be used by consumers to compare these free e-mail services based on how frequently they crash.
"Microsoft does not have any information to share here. Apologies if this causes an inconvenience," a Microsoft spokeswoman wrote in an e-mail to CNN. Microsoft is the maker of Windows Live Hotmail.
"We don't release that data," wrote a Yahoo spokeswoman.
Google, however, says Gmail was up 99.984% of the time in 2010.
On average, that means Gmail was down for about 7 minutes per month, Google says in a blog post:
"That 7-minute average represents the accumulation of small delays of a few seconds, and most people experienced no issues at all."
Google also offers a site, called the Apps Status Dashboard, where Google Apps users can see whether a certain product is up and running at any time.
The company earlier this week said it was in the process of recovering e-mails it lost during a software upgrade.
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