The project looked like a joint effort by several internet companies. Internet Invest includes, MiroHost, PingWin, Infostore.org and Ukrainskaya Bannernaya. Besides the group, two private investors took part in the financing, and according to the total investment exceeded $1 million.
The service's main feature was whitelist-based spam protection, meaning protection built on the address book. Messages from addresses the user had already saved were accepted, and the protection itself rested on a list of permitted senders. For email services of the time this was a notable departure, since the main fight against spam was waged with filters based on message content.
Beyond that protection, Mail.ua offered a personal web page for the user with a contact form, an unlimited number of additional addresses and visual themes. For now the service worked only as webmail. POP3 and IMAP, the protocols mail programs use to retrieve messages, and SMTP, used to send them, were promised for later.
Public testing was planned to begin within a month, and the final release, in 's phrasing, was to take place "this year." At the time of publication, then, the project was at its earliest stage, when the interface and features could still change.
Comparison with mail.ru, and
The author compared Mail.ua with mail.ru, and — the best-known email services then used in Ukraine and Russia. The greatest praise went to the domain name, the address book and the interface. Of the latter the author wrote plainly:
"The interface is intuitive and causes no difficulty in use"
Among the shortcomings were the absence of spell-checking and the sluggishness of the interface. For a service only just emerging from closed testing, these remarks meant serious refinement lay ahead before a full launch.
The team that built the service
By 2008 Alexei Mas was already well known in the Ukrainian internet. Together with Ruslan Dmitrakovich he launched the Ukrainian Banner Network (UBN) in January 1999. By known accounts, work on the first version took about three weeks and cost around $100. In March 2000 Mas became director of the Ukrainian portal UAPortal, and in autumn 2001 he sat on the expert jury of the Sun Awards.
The scale of UBN by 2008 was considerable. In an interview published in March 2008, Mas spoke of 36 million impressions a day. One of the group's projects was Infostore.org, by then used as a file-sharing service and accessible via UA-IX.
What happened next
On 4 and 5 December 2008 Ukraine's Interior Ministry seized Infostore's servers, including 18 servers, two storage units and a switch. The search lasted 12 hours. These events became the loudest episode in the group's history of that period and had nothing to do with the launch of Mail.ua.
In July and August 2012 Mail.ua passed to Mail.ru Group. Mail.Ru Group vice-president Anna Artamonova confirmed the purchase. According to unofficial reports, the deal was worth about $500,000, and the service's audience at that point numbered around 300,000 users.
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