Among several other recent enhancements, Mail.ru announced last week that its webmail service now supports the Internet Message Access Protocol.
Commonly known as IMAP, this protocol now allows Mail.ru users who have email accounts with other services – including Gmail, Yahoo, AOL and the webmail services of Yandex and Rambler – to send and receive emails from their Mail.ru account.
Emails from other email accounts can also be accessed using Mail.ru’s mobile apps.
Folders and parameters created with other email accounts are still accessible from the Mail.ru interface.
One important feature is not yet available, though it is promised soon: the ability to attribute outgoing emails to an external account even when sending them from within the Mail.ru interface.
Mail.ru claims its users send or receive 12 million messages every hour, which represents a traffic volume of more than 4 million megabytes. Almost as many messages are blocked by the service’s antispam software.
2 million users in Ukraine, 2 from Vatican City
With a monthly audience exceeding 45 million users from 12 to 64 years of age as of January 2013, according to TNS, Mail.ru stands as the most popular webmail service on the Russian-speaking Internet – ahead of Yandex, Google, and Rambler.
Such figures have made the service the fourth most popular in Europe, as revealed by ComScore last year.
However, even though the service has been made available in several international languages, Mail.ru is used by small numbers of users beyond Russia and other republics of the former Soviet Union.
According to Mail.ru Group, IM services ICQ and Agent Mail.ru, which are also its properties, attract 15.9 million and 23.2 million users from Russia and other countries of the world, respectively, each month.
