Mail.ru
Type	Public corporation
Founded	2001
Headquarters	Russia
Key people	Dmitry Grishin
Industry	Internet information providers
Products	Internet services (electronic mail, search engine, website catalogue, instant messaging, blogging, information, answers service)
Revenue	?
Employees	?
Slogan	Национальная почтовая служба (National post service)
Website	http://mail.ru
Type of site	web portal
Advertising	yes
Available in	Russian
Launched	September 27, 1997
Current status	active

Mail.ru is the largest free e-mail service of the Runet. The company started to operate under its present name on October 16, 2001. Before that time its brand name was owned by Port.ru. It is headed by Dmitry Grishin. As of June 2008, its global Alexa rating is 22.[1]

Statistics

• According to Alexa data for June 2007, Mail.ru was the most popular Russian site on the web.[2]
• As of November 2005 there more than 30 million users, 25 million emails a day, and it's still growing.
• By the end of 2006 it was announced that a strategic agreement with Yandex was achieved about the use of a Yandex search engine instead of Google.
• In January 2007 30% shares of Mail.ru were bought by South African company Naspers for $165 million.^[1]
• It is reported by Grishin that the two other shareholders are the Digital Sky Technologies (DST) and Tiger Global Management (TGM).

Mail.ru portal

Mail.ru wraps around not only an e-mail service, but also

• a search engine mentioned above
• a web-site catalogue
• Mail.ru Agent, a proprietary instant messenger with a built-in mail checker and based on mail service authorization tokens.
• a blogging service (Blog@Mail.ru)
• a subscription service
• an answers service (Otvet@Mail.ru)
• an informational services (weather report, theatre bills, etc.).

The service provides unlimited storage with a ten gigabytes of initial storage (as of March 2008).

Relationship with Spammers

Unfortunately, this email is often being used by spammers and internet trolls to spam or flamewar Internet forums, blogs and wikis like Wikipedia.^[2]

References

1. ^ "African Naspers buys 30% stake in one of Russia’s biggest internet portals", C-News (2007-01-24). Retrieved on 2007-06-05. 
2. ^ http://www.theadminzone.com/forums/showthread.php?t=22280

External links

• (Russian) Mail.ru Portal

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