Information about the domain owner is published in the whois database, where the registrar enters contact details. According to InternetUA, the 'changed' field for Mail.ua shows July 2012, and the domain itself is registered to Nessly Holdings Limited. The same company owns the trademark under which the address is registered. For Mail.ru, this scheme is convenient: the Cypriot holding holds the group's assets, and in public records the company appears as an intermediary, without direct mention of the parent structure.
In 2012, Mail.ua was one of the notable Ukrainian email services, and its history is closely tied to a group of people who built the Ukrainian internet since the late 1990s. In August 2008, the service entered closed testing: the project architect was Alexey Mas, and development was financed by the Internet Invest group, which invested more than $1 million. Internet Invest was headed by Alexander Olshansky, who later became one of the organizers of the Ukrainian internet professionals' forum iForum.
Seven Years of Talks and 'Half a Lemon'
According to InternetUA, Mail.ru had been seeking to buy this domain for more than seven years. The editorial staff recalled that in the summer, its source overheard a conversation in a Kyiv restaurant between people 'with a Moscow accent' about a purchase. As InternetUA wrote, the conversation included a sum that the interlocutors referred to with a short word:
'A sum was casually mentioned — "half a lemon"'
The conversation itself did not confirm the involvement of specific individuals in the deal, so the publication relied on what was heard and on the matching whois data. Later, in a follow-up, the same deal was mentioned unofficially: a sum of about $500,000 and about 300,000 email users were cited. This differed from the initial version that Mail.ru had acquired the domain already in August, so regarding the timeline, the editorial staff relied on the date of the owner change in whois.
A Market Growing Faster Than Email
Interest in Mail.ua was explained not only by email but also by advertising. According to InternetUA, the advertising market of the Ukrainian internet, which in those years was called Uanet, was growing 40–50% per year. Mail.ru Group accounted for 10–15% of the advertising revenues of this market. For a holding that already worked with the Russian internet, buying a Ukrainian service meant access to an audience and advertising budgets that were rapidly being redistributed among platforms.
By that time, Uanet had its own history. The Ukrainian Banner Network, UBS, was launched in January 1999 by Alexey Mas and Ruslan Dmitrakovich. According to Mas himself in a 2008 interview, the network delivered 36 million impressions per day. Before that, Mas graduated from the radio physics faculty of Kyiv State University, worked at Ukrainsky Kapital bank and at the National Bank of Ukraine, where he handled Visa processing. In 2000, he became director of UAPortal, a Ukrainian portal co-founded by Alexander Soroka, Alexander Koreshkov and Alexander Barabash. That is why the market perceived him as one of the architects of the Ukrainian web, not as a random developer.
Silence from the Parties
Neither Alexey Mas nor the Mail.ru Group press service responded to the editorial staff's requests by the time of publication. At the end of the article, InternetUA itself congratulated Mas 'on the successful sale of the startup.' The congratulation sounded like an ironic comment on the fact that the deal was made without an official announcement and without the project's author engaging in open dialogue with the press.
In the end, the picture looked like this: the domain Mail.ua belonged to a Cypriot company linked to Mail.ru Group, the change of owner was recorded in July, and there was no public confirmation at the time the article was published. Some time later, Anna Artamonova confirmed the purchase, but in August 2012 this information remained the publication's version, based on whois, contacts and conversations in a restaurant.
Alexey Mas died in Kyiv on October 6, 2021, at the age of 47, after an illness.
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