Mail.com

Mail.com
Type of business Webmail Provider
Type of site
 Webmail provider
Available in English, Spanish, French, Russian, Portuguese, Romanian
Headquarters Chesterbrook, Pennsylvania, United States
Area served Worldwide (except German-speaking countries)
Industry Internet
Parent United Internet
Website www.mail.com
Advertising Yes
Registration Yes
Launched 1995 (1995)

Mail.com is a web portal and web-based email service provider owned by the German internet company United Internet. It offers news articles and videos and a free webmail application with unlimited storage.[1]

Features

Mail.com offers a free, advertising-supported email service with unlimited storage for emails, choice of over 200 domains, online file storage, collecting of emails from other accounts (which is now a paid for service), organizer, Facebook integration, and spam and virus protection.[2]

Mail.com reserves the right to cancel a domain name for even premium (pay) accounts whenever they decide to do so.[3]

Email

Mail.com features unlimited storage and attachments of up to 50 MB. In addition to the address chosen at sign-up, users can create up to nine additional aliases (for a maximum total of ten addresses, one of which the user chooses as default). All ten user email addresses deliver to the default user email in-box, so only one login is required. Users can configure their mail.com account to collect their emails from other accounts and servers. This service is still free.[4]

Domains

Users can choose from more than 200 domains for their personal email address including geographical locations, professions, beliefs and interests such as Europe.com, Consultant.com, Accountant.com, Muslim.com, Brew-meister.com and Catlover.com.[5]

Security

Mail.com is one of the last remaining major email providers who do not ask for a personal phone number to set up an inbox, making them one of the last providers to respect user privacy. This also means their users do not have the option to secure their email accounts by using two-factor authentication (2FA), which is a form of multi-factor authentication. This leaves their users accounts open to logins from unauthorized devices in the unlikely event that the user's password has been obtained. All other major email providers such as Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Outlook, and AOL Mail provide the option to switch on 2FA which means any user who logs in to their email account from a new device will require a specific code. This code can be generated by an authenticator application such as Google Authenticator or sent to them via SMS to a previously registered phone number, which adds an extra layer of security. A full list of email providers that have this feature available or not can be found at twofactorauth.org.[6]

Storage

Mail.com offers its users unlimited storage for emails as well as 2 GB online file storage.[4]

Organizer

The organizer lets the user schedule tasks and events. Similar to desktop organizer applications, the user can set reminders, invite guests and import and export data to and from the *.ics and *.csv formats.

Mobile clients

Mail.com offers applications for Android and iOS.

History

Mail.com was originally formed in 1995 as Vanity Mail Services (corporate name Globecomm Inc.),[7] by Gerald Gorman, an investment banker at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, and Gary Millin, a Harvard Business School student at the time.[8]

They spent a majority of Gorman's wealth[8] to register and promote a total of 544 domains, and later began to buy domain names from other companies. At one time the company owned more than 1,200 domains on speculation, including world.com, usa.com, India.com, Europe.com, Asia.com, doctor.com, scientist.com, and lawyer.com.[9] To raise money to pay the yearly domain registration fees, they offered vanity domain email services to the public[10] from the domains they owned under the brand name iName,[10] and later began hosting mail services on behalf of the owners of other domains, and for Internet service providers. The speculation was often successful. In 1999 the company sold kosher.com, London.com and England.com for $2 million.[11]

By 1999 the company had raised venture financing from Primus Capital Funds and Sycamore Ventures, and changed its name to mail.com. It conducted an initial public offering in June 1999.[12] By 2000 it was supporting 14.6 million email accounts, mostly for free, and remained unprofitable.[10] It sold the mail.com domain and consumer email services division to Net2Phone,[13] changed its name to Easylink, and changed its business operations to focus on managed file transfer services in April 2001, after acquiring Swift Telecommunications, which in turn had spun off the "Easylink" business unit from AT&T.[14][15][16]

In 2004 Jay Penske, son of automobile racing figure Roger Penske, joined and became CEO of Velocity Services, an affinity marketing and Internet services company operating as Interactive Digital Publishing Group.[17] The company acquired the mail.com domain, and re-launched it as a new service in 2007.[18] Parent company Mail.com Media went on to acquire content websites such as Deadline.com, Movieline and the Boy Genius Report.

In September 2010, Mail.com Media sold Mail.com to United Internet, which intended to integrate it into GMX Mail. While existing accounts could be accessed from anywhere, users accessing the site from German-speaking countries could no longer sign up and were instead invited to use United Internet's GMX services geared to those markets (gmx.de, gmx.at, gmx.ch).

At the beginning of September 2013, Mail.com e-mailed all account-holders of madrid.com, london.com and tokyo.com addresses, stating that they would no longer be able to send or receive e-mail from 28 September 2013.

References

  1. ↑ Tsotsis, Alexia. "Mail.com Media Sells Mail.com To United Internet Group". TechCrunch.com. Retrieved 24 April 2017.
  2. ↑ "mail.com". Facebook.com. Retrieved 24 April 2017.
  3. ↑ "General Terms and Conditions". Mail.com. Retrieved 24 April 2017.
  4. 1 2 "Secure & free webmail features for your mails". Mail.com. Retrieved 24 April 2017.
  5. ↑ "mail.com more than 200 domains". Mail.com. Retrieved 24 April 2017.
  6. ↑ https://twofactorauth.org/>
  7. ↑ "EasyLink Services Corp. To Appear on MN1.com". M2 Communications (press release). 6 September 1996.
  8. 1 2 Andrea Peterson (11 February 1999). "Mail.com Intends to Profit by Giving Away Its Product". Wall Street Journal.
  9. ↑ Lawson, Stephen (28 March 2000). "Mail.com Buys Chinese Portal, Plans World.com". ComputerWorld. Retrieved 1 August 2017.
  10. 1 2 3 Michael Bociurkiw (2000-06-02). "Mail.com Shouldn't Stay Master of Its Domains". Forbes.
  11. ↑ Stephanie Gruner (1999-06-17). "European Firms Pay Big Money to Obtain '.Com' Domain Names". Wall Street Journal.
  12. ↑ Larry Barrett (30 June 1999). "Mail.com surges on ISP deals". cnet.
  13. ↑ Gwendolyn Mariano (2001-06-21). "Outages delay Mail.com service". cnet.
  14. ↑ "Mail.com to Acquire Swift Telecommunications, Including AT&T's EasyLink". internetnews.com. 2001-02-21.
  15. ↑ Faith Keenan (2001-07-04). "On the Third Try, a Dot-Com Charm?". Business Week.
  16. ↑ "Mail.com Changes Corporate Name and Identity to EasyLink Services Corporation". Easylink (press release). 2 April 2001.
  17. ↑ Alan Shipnuck (2004-07-14). "Hitting Cleanup". Sports Illustrated. Archived from the original on 2008-03-31.
  18. ↑ Amit Chowdhry (2008-10-22). "Quadrangle Capital, WI Harper Group, and Novel TMT Ventures Delivers $35 Million to Mail.com". Pulse2.
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