Mail.ru says 'да' to half a BILLION dollars, flogs its 14m Facebook shares Russian internet giant Mail.ru has gotten rid of the last of its Facebook shares, making over $525m. The company originally invested $200m in Facebook in 2009 and had a stake worth around $700m just before the social network went public last year. Mail.ru sold off some of its stock in the IPO and said it had let the remaining …
> mail.ru is a prolific source of spam.
HAR! HAR!
> Using their service probably means a lot of forums would silently drop your registration requests
Such as?
> Same goes for gmx.com
HAR! HAR! HAR!
> and some others.
Such as?
Point is, both the ones you mentioned are great FREE email services. For the former, it has the advantage of not being US-based (the second as I recall is provided by a US branch of United Internet, a German ISP).
"HAR! HAR!"
You're easily amused. I've had over 2000 bogus spam accounts from that domain alone on a forum I run. So I blocked it.
"Such as?"
Yandex.ru, List.ru, Ya.ru, Sina.com and others. I block them all thanks for their prolific amount of spam. I am quite certain that I am not alone amongst admins with a low opinion of these services.
But you can HAR HAR all you like if you use them. It won't alter the point I was making or my opinion of these services one little bit.
I switched over to mail.yandex.com for my main account when mail.ru dropped English support. Meanwhile Yandex is increasing its English language support and services. Still need to navigate Cyrillic for the calendar and adding domain-based email though. At least their servers are in Ekaterinburg and Luxembourg rather than with a direct pipe to Fort Meade. I still use mail.ru as my spam sink though.
And now your emails are not read by NSA (as long as your contacts stay within mail.ru) though you may be marked as suspect for using the service. Never used it myself but know people that do (and could care less about spam and dubious quality toolbar that come with email/chat/who knows what client software).
I guess as the result of recent insecurity fallout mail.ru figured that former USSR/east block users prefer to be spied on only by Putin's (or service of their own country) people and not both Putin's and NSA's and this may make them think twice before using offshore services (like FB) and it's time to get rid off the stocks before price decline (also market seems to be inflated for no good reason). I won't cry for FB if their stock tanked.
Maybe they knew perfectly well that Facebook does not make enough to justify the valuations of it, and thought they would sell their shares while they are valued at a lot more than they are worth by any rational justification of facebooks income?
I mean, you sell while the bubble is blown up, but before it bursts. Sounds like a perfectly sensible move to me!
There are people who contend, plausibly, that Russia's richest man is actually Vladimir Putin. However, his wealth is hidden in a labyrinth of shell companies and the usual dodges that people use to hide their ownership of things, for the ownership of which they can not plausibly, and legally, account.
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