Mail.ua was a Ukrainian email service that entered closed beta testing in August 2008. At that time, Alexey Mas was named its architect, and the project was financed by the Internet Invest group with more than a million dollars in investment. Over four years, the email service built up an audience estimated by the Center for Journalistic Investigations at around 300,000 users. These were the users who, after the deal, were to be migrated to Mail.ru. The service only got a Ukrainian interface in March 2012, that is, shortly before the move to the Russian holding.
The deal was confirmed to Vedomosti by Anna Artamonova, vice-president of Mail.ru Group. She did not name the sum, so the only estimate remains the newspaper's anonymous source, according to whom it was $500,000. This figure should be treated as unofficial, since neither party has confirmed it.
Purchase or integration
The parties' positions in this story diverge. According to Artamonova, Mail.ru acquired the email service. The head of Internet Invest Group, Alexander Olshansky, had earlier told AIN.ua that there was an integration agreement between the companies, and that a sale was only possible in the future. In other words, in August 2012 one side described a completed deal, while the other had recently presented it as a prospect.
In the file on which this material is based, the deal was initially called a domain deal. Sources do not confirm this: according to them, the email service was sold in its entirety, along with the transfer of users. The domain was only part of what passed to Mail.ru.
Email from a banner network
Alexey Mas did not build Mail.ua from scratch. Together with Ruslan Dmitrakovich, in January 1999 he launched the Ukrainian Banner Network, written in Perl over three weeks of work and about $100 in expenses. Later, on March 7, 2000, Mas became director of the Ukrainian Portal (UAPortal), whose founders were Alexander Soroka, Alexander Koreshkov, and Alexander Barabash of IP-Telecom. Email became one of his next projects in a series that tied him to the Ukrainian internet.
On Mas's personal website, Mail.ua was until the end described as: "our answer to Mail.ru." The phrase sounded like a challenge to the Russian competitor, not a description of a future purchase, and it is precisely in this contrast between early ambition and the outcome in 2012 that the main conflict of the story lies.
What happened next
A few months after Mail.ua launched, Mas found himself at the center of another high-profile story. On December 4 and 5, 2008, the Ministry of Internal Affairs seized the servers of the Infostore project: 18 servers, two storage systems, and a switch, and the search lasted 12 hours. On December 10, a press conference was held by the Ukrainian Internet Business Association, and on December 23, Mas gave an interview in which he called Infostore a non-commercial project.
Meanwhile, Mas continued to develop industry events. On April 1, 2009, the first Ukrainian Internet Professionals Forum was held, later known as iForum, to mark the 10th anniversary of the Ukrainian Banner Network. It was attended by 1,280 people, and Mas put together the program. Alexander Olshansky was a co-organizer of the forum.
In April 2012, while negotiations over the fate of the email service were underway, Mas was publishing columns and essays that were reprinted by industry publications. In 2013, iForum continued, and in 2016 Mas became an advisor to Kyivstar on digital technologies. In recent years, his name was often associated with the Ukrainian internet as a whole, not just with email or banner networks.
"our answer to Mail.ru"
Alexey Mas died in Kyiv on October 6, 2021, at the age of 47 after an illness. His death was reported on October 8 by his brother Viktor Mas, as written by.
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