VKontakte is now fully owned by Mail.Ru Group

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Mail.ru Group bought 48% of Russia's largest social network VKontakte from Ilya Shcherbovich's United Capital Partners (UCP) fund. The transaction amount was $1.47 billion. Thus, Mail.ru Group became the sole owner of VKontakte.

Photo: Oleg Kharseev, Kommersant

The Russian Internet company Mail.ru Group announced the purchase of 48% of the social network VKontakte from its second shareholder, the UCP fund, according to Mail.ru Group’s official statement on the London Stock Exchange. The sellers of the shares were Blesmir Development Limited and Palagon Limited.

The amount of the deal closed today was $1.47 billion. Since the first investment in VK shares in 2007, Mail.ru Group has paid $2.07 billion entirely for 100% of VKontakte (VK), the company said. To purchase 48.01% of VKontakte shares, funds in the accounts of Mail.Ru Group, as well as a loan in the amount of 22.2 billion rubles, were used. ($585 million at the rate of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation), provided by Gazprombank for four years at 11.5% per annum. At the same time, UCP, Mail.ru Group and the founder of VKontakte Pavel Durov agree that the parties immediately withdraw all mutual claims with this transaction.

VKontakte's revenue in 2013 amounted to 3.8 billion rubles. (growth by 14%), EBITDA - 1 billion rubles. (an increase of 32%), net profit - 53 million rubles. In the first half of 2014, VKontakte generated revenue of 2 billion rubles, EBITDA amounted to 694 million rubles, and net profit amounted to 248 million rubles. According to comScore, in July 2014, the social network's monthly audience worldwide amounted to more than 92 million users.

Mail login

Mail Mail is the most popular free email messaging service on the RuNet. Through it you can instantly send and receive letters from any country in the world. They are delivered in a few minutes and, in addition to text, can also contain files: photographs, documents, music and videos.

If you already have a mailbox in Mail, now I will show you how to access it correctly. And if you don’t have such an email yet, you first need to register in the system. Read about this below.

How to log into your mailbox on a computer

You can log into my Myla page from any computer: PC, laptop or netbook. Even from someone else’s computer: at work, school or in a club.

To do this, you need to open your browser, go to the mail.ru website and enter your login information. Now I will show you how to do it correctly.

On a note. A browser is an Internet program through which you work on the Internet. This could be Google Chrome, Yandex, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer or another program.

1. Open a new tab.

2. Type mail.ru in the address bar and press the Enter button on your keyboard.

The main page of the Mail.ru website will load. To get to your mail, you need to enter your login information in the rectangle in the upper left corner.

The program may have already filled in your data from a previous login. Then just click on “Mail”. Immediately after this, your box will open.

3. In the “Mailbox name” line, type your email login. Login is the part of the address before the @ sign.

For example, if the address of the mailbox, then you need to type ivan.petrov56 in this field. No spaces and no period at the end.

If the mailing address ends not in mail.ru, but in list.ru, or bk.ru, or inbox.ru, then click on the adjacent @mail.ru field and select the desired ending.

4. In the “Password” line, type the code for your mailbox (it will be typed in dots). Then click on the “Login” button.

If you open your mail on someone else's computer, uncheck the "Remember" box.

Your personal account will open on the mail.ru website. This is your email Mail. It looks something like this:

On a note. I just showed you how to log into mail.ru via a browser. But you can work with letters in another way - in a special program (mail client). The most popular such program is Microsoft Outlook. But there are others: Windows Mail, The Bat!, Mozilla Thunderbird, Apple Mail, etc. Read more about setting them up at the link.

How to log into mail from your phone

On modern mobile phones and tablets you can fully work with Mail. There are two ways to do this - through a browser or through an application.

Logging in through a browser is when you launch an Internet program and log into your email account. An application is a separate program that is installed on a mobile phone. It is more convenient to work with mail through the application.

Methods for logging into mail.ru mail from a smartphone or tablet

Login via browser

1. At the top of your browser, type m.mail.ru and go to this address.

2. Click on the inscription “Mail”.

3. In the “Login” field, type the name of your mailbox before the @ sign. For example, if the name is [email protected] , then you need to type ivan.petrov56

If your mailbox does not end with mail.ru, then in the adjacent field, where it says @mail.ru, select the desired ending. This could be @inbox.ru, @list.ru, @bk.ru.

4. In the “Password” field, type the password for the mailbox and click “Login”.

If you access your mail not from your device, but from someone else’s, then remove the checkbox from the “Remember” item.

A list of incoming emails will open. That's it - you're logged into your email inbox!

Mobile app

Working with emails through a browser is convenient, but only if you rarely use email. Rarely means no more than once a week. In other cases, it is better to use an email client. This is an application that helps you quickly receive and send letters.

Often your phone already has a built-in email client. As a rule, it is called “Mail” or “Mail” and is located right on the screen. Read about how to set up such an application on iPhone and iPad here, and on Android here.

But there is another option - the official Mail.ru application. It has more features:

• Search through all letters in the mailbox
• Grouping emails by subject
• You can add multiple mailboxes and quickly switch between them
• You can add not only Mail boxes, but also other services: Yandex, Gmail, Yahoo, etc.
• There is an address book, a personal spam filter, notes and much more.

You can download the official Mail.ru application using the following links:

VKontakte: We are eliminating email as an entity

Internet

Business Web services Investments and M&A

25 July 2011 09:07 25 July 2011 09:07 |
Share The social network Vkontakte has launched a service for sending messages to external e-mail.
According to a representative of the social network, the email will soon be “liquidated as an entity.” The VKontakte social network has gained mail functionality: it is now possible to send messages from the social network to external email. To do this, says the administration of the social network, you need to indicate any email address in the message sending field.

Representative of the social network Vladislav Tsyplukhin

stated that, in his opinion, the active development of the Vkontakte mail service will in the near future “make it possible to abandon traditional email and eliminate it as an entity.”

He recalls that VKontakte is consistently building the functionality of an email service within the social network: “First, we abandoned the need to link an email account to a user account, and then the developers allowed network participants to exchange documents.”

The Vkontakte administration announced its intention to launch its own email service in April 2011. After the social network moves to the international domain vk.com, users will be able not only to send messages by email, but also to receive them. In addition to short names like vk.com/name, it will be possible to activate the email address [email protected], the network administration reports.

Currently, outgoing letters from VKontakte users come from the address vkmessenger.com, and instead of the user’s name, a combination of his nickname and a complex alphanumeric identifier appears.

According to a VKontakte representative, members of the social network will soon have the opportunity to send messages by email, including from group dialogues. Thus, the participant in the conversation will receive all updates to his email address and will be able to respond to them.

The founder of VKontakte Pavel Durov expresses his attitude towards Mail.ru

Tsyplukhin’s provocative statement about the imminent death of “traditional email” may be caused by some cooling of relations between the social network “Vkontakte” and its shareholder, the Mail.ru holding company, which also owns the postal service of the same name, the largest in the Runet.

Last week it was discovered that the social network Vkontakte was blocking links to the file hosting files.mail.ru. Head of the social network Pavel Durov

in the tech blog “Roem.Ru”, explaining this fact, he stated that “Vkontakte blocks files.mail.ru because it is a tasteless warehouse of viruses and Varese, in fact, like other mail.ru services.”

Last Friday, July 22, 2011, Durov’s Twitter posted a photograph of him with his middle finger extended upward and the caption: “The official response to the trash holding Mail.ru to its latest attempts to absorb Vkontakte.” Let us recall that in mid-July 2011, the Mail.ru Group holding increased its stake in Vkontakte from 24.99% to 39.99%.

Representatives of the Mail.ru Group holding refused to comment on Pavel Durov’s statements.

• Red Hat Summit Connect

Vladislav Meshcheryakov
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Mail.ru mail registration

You only need to register if you don’t already have a mailbox in Mail. After all, registration means creating a new email with a new address. If you already have a mailbox, you don't need to register!

1. Open a new tab, type mail.ru in the address bar and press Enter on your keyboard.

2. Click on the “Register a new mailbox” link on the left side of the site.

3. Fill out each field of the form.

Name. Type your name.

Surname. Type your last name.

Date of Birth. Enter the day, month and year of your birth.

Floor. Select gender - male or female.

Desired postal address. In this line you need to type the name for your future box. You can use both letters and numbers, as well as a period, underscore, or hyphen. But the letters must be typed in the Latin alphabet, because all addresses on the Internet are only in English.

Pay attention to the end of the address. Initially it is @mail.ru, but you can choose something else: @inbox.ru, @list.ru or @bk.ru.

Password. Here you need to print the code with which you will open your box. It must contain English letters and numbers. At least six and no spaces.

Password confirmation. In this line you need to type the same code as in the previous field.

Telephone. Here the site asks you to type your mobile number. This is not required, but I highly recommend including it. After all, if problems arise with access to the mailbox, the easiest way to restore it will be through your phone.

Example of filling out the registration form

When all fields are completed, click the “Register” button. The system will ask you to print the numbers from the picture, and then your new email account will open. You can use it right away - send and receive letters.

If you encounter any difficulties during registration, please read the detailed instructions.

VKontakte is now fully owned by Mail.Ru Group

Now no one will be surprised if the Mail.Ru Group corporation is renamed “Russian Social Networks”. Negotiations have been completed between the two main owners of the largest social network on the Runet, VKontakte - the management of Mail.Ru Group and the UCP investment fund.

Their result was a deal that, apparently, will become the loudest in the domestic segment of the Internet this year. The 48.01 percent of VKontakte shares that were at the disposal of the UCP fund became the property of Mail.Ru. This purchase cost the IT giant $1.47 billion.

In addition to its own funds, the company was forced to borrow more than $580 million from Gazprombank. The term of the bank loan was four years, and the interest rate was 11.5% per annum.

In this regard, it is worth recalling that back in 2007, Mail.Ru Group bought a 52% stake in VKontakte, however, then these securities were much cheaper.

Since then, the project team has achieved significant success, turning VKontakte into the undisputed leader in the segment of social platforms on the Runet, which affected the value of assets.

During his keynote speeches in 2011, VKontakte founder and former CEO of the company Pavel Durov spoke about his intention to eventually conduct an IPO on the American stock exchange. However, it is now obvious that VKontakte will have a different development path.

In addition to negotiations on the acquisition of a stake, the leaders of Mail.Ru Group sought from their former business partners from UCP the termination of a number of legal proceedings, in particular, a complete renunciation of claims against Pavel Durov.

Whom Ilya Shcherbovich (head of the UCP investment fund) accused of embezzlement and failure to fulfill the terms of the contract provided for by the position of general director.

Ultimately, all parties involved in the past period of development of VKontakte managed to reach the “zero option”, abandoning any mutual claims and withdrawing the claims.

Thus, a new stage of existence begins for the leading Russian social network, not burdened by long-standing corporate disputes and scandals.

It is worth noting that in the first six months of 2014, VKontakte’s revenue amounted to about 2 billion rubles, and its net profit was 248 million.

The main shareholder of Mail.Ru Group is Alisher Usmanov, the richest man in Russia. In addition to VKontakte, the company controls such popular social networks as Odnoklassniki and Moi Mir.

Learning to use an email account

All actions with mail take place in the user’s personal account. Through it we receive and send letters, photographs and documents.

Your mail.ru personal account looks like this:

On the left side there are folders:

• Inbox - all received messages are stored here.
• Sent is the folder where sent messages go (they are duplicated in it).
• Drafts is a folder where your unsent messages are saved. Through this folder you can restore a letter after a failure.
• Spam - advertising junk is placed here.
• Trash – emails that you have deleted from your mailbox are stored here.

The most important folder is the “Inbox”. All new messages (except spam) go into it. Messages that have not yet been opened are highlighted in bold, and those that have already been opened are highlighted in light blue.

To open a letter, you just need to left-click on it.

How to send a letter

To write and send a letter, click on the button labeled “Write a letter” in the upper left corner.

A new page will load. In the “To” line, type the email address of the person you want to write a letter to.

On a note. All addresses on the Internet consist of letters of the Latin alphabet (English). Approximately in the middle there is an @ sign, after which the mail site is written. There is no period at the end. Example

In the “Subject” line, type the subject of the letter, that is, briefly say what it is about or from whom. You can print the topic in Russian letters.

The text of the letter is printed in a large white field. If there is a lot of text, this field will automatically expand (a slider will appear on the side).

After you fill out the required lines, click the “Submit” button once and wait a few seconds. If everything is in order, a page will load that says “Your email has been sent.” A copy of the letter will remain in the Sent Items folder.

How to send a file

To send a photo or document, you need to do the same as when sending a letter normally. Namely, fill in the “To”, “Subject” fields and print the text of the letter.

But just before you click the “Submit” button, you need to add a file inside. To do this, click on the “Attach file” sign (under the “Subject” line).

A small window will appear. Find in it the photo, document or other file that you want to send and double-click on it with the left mouse button.

The window will disappear, and the letter will show the file you added.

If the file is large on your computer, you may have to wait a little while for it to download.

You can add not one, but several files to a letter. To do this, repeat the same with each of them: click “Attach file” and select the desired one from the window.

When all files are attached, click on the “Submit” button. After this, a page will load that says “Your email has been sent.” This means everything is in order - within a few minutes it will reach the recipient.

How to reply to a letter

Email has a function to reply to an incoming letter. Thanks to it, you do not need to enter the sender's address and subject. In addition, all previous correspondence is duplicated, which is very convenient.

1. Open the incoming letter and click on the “Reply” button at the top.

2. The form for composing a letter will be loaded with the “To” and “Subject” lines already filled in. The sender's text will be duplicated in the message print field. Write your text first, before the previous correspondence.

Example:

Important! It is considered good form to respond to incoming letters and save the correspondence. Therefore, it is advisable not to change anything in the “Subject” field and not to delete the previous text.

Just like when composing a regular letter, you can add files inside. And to send, the “Send” button is also used.

I can’t log into Mail mail - what to do?

Problems with logging into mail.ru mail occur for various reasons:

• Incorrect box name;
• Password error;
• Logged in to another email;
• and others.

Now I will tell you in detail about the most common access problems and ways to solve them.

"Invalid username or password" error

This is one of the most common problems: you enter the mailbox address and password for it, and instead of letters the error “Invalid name or password” pops up.

Solutions:

1. Check email address
2. Copy the password using Notepad

Step 1: Check your email address. If, when entering, you type at least one incorrect letter or number in the mailbox address, the mail will not open. In addition, it is important to choose the right prefix - after all, it can be not only @mail.ru, but @list.ru, @bk.ru or @inbox.ru.

Let's say my mail address. If you miss just one letter, number or dot, the mailbox will no longer open. For example, instead of iliya.86, type ilya.86.

It is also equally important to choose the right ending. After all, even if I type everything correctly, but mail.ru is indicated instead of list.ru, the mail will not open. Because [email protected] and are two different addresses.

Please note that the address cannot contain Russian letters - only English ones. And it is written together, without spaces.

Step 2: Copy the password using Notepad. The situation with a password is approximately the same as with an address: there is only a mistake in one letter or number and it will not work. In addition, the size of the letters is also important. If you type a small letter instead of a capital letter, the password will be incorrect.

The Notepad program will help you avoid mistakes. To launch it, open Start, type the word notepad in the bottom search bar and select the program.

A white window will open. Type your password into it. Remember: there are no spaces (neither before, nor after, nor in the middle) and it consists only of English letters/numbers.

If all your letters are printed in large size, press the Caps Lock key on your keyboard once.

Then click on the "Edit" button at the top and select "Select All".

It should look something like this:

Now hover your mouse over the highlighted password, right-click on it and select “Copy”.

The password is saved in the clipboard and now you need to paste it into Mail. To do this, go to mail.ru, right-click in the “Password” field and select “Insert”.

Now that both the email address and password are entered correctly, all that remains is to click the “Login” button. If all is well, your inbox will open.

Restoring access to mail

Have you carefully entered your login and copied your password from Notepad, but your email still won’t open? Then the only way to get it back is to restore access.

But to do this you need to know exactly your address (see Step 1). If you are not sure about it, it is better to ask the person with whom you have previously corresponded. Maybe he has saved messages from you - then the address will be written at the top of the letter.

How to restore access to mail. Open the mail.ru website and in the mail login form, click on the “Forgot your password?” link.

Enter your email address and click “Recover”.

Next, Mail will ask you to perform some action: answer a security question, indicate part of a phone number or another email address. This is the data that was assigned to password recovery.

For example, the system asks you to enter two phone numbers. This phone number was specified in the mail settings. So, we write the numbers, enter the code from the picture and click “Receive code via SMS”.

A window will appear to enter the code, and it will be sent to this phone number via SMS message. We print and click “Done”.

Then you will need to enter a new password to log in to your mail and repeat it. We print and click “Login to mail”.

The password must contain English letters and numbers. There are at least six characters in total.

Immediately after this, your email account will open. Now it will be accessible using the new password.

If access cannot be restored. Often the user is unable to recover the password because the data is lost. I don't have access to my phone number, I forgot the answer to my security question.

For such cases, there is a special link in the password recovery form. It’s called “I don’t have access to the specified phone number” or “I don’t remember the answer.”

Clicking on it will open a questionnaire. It must be filled in with the data for which the mail was registered:

• Name
• Surname
• Date of Birth
• Registration password
• When was the post office registered?
• Secret question and answer
• Email for contact

Enter the information you remember and click “Continue.”

Be sure to enter a different email address in the “Email for contact” line. After all, it is he who will make the decision to restore access. If you don't have an address, register it in Yandex or Gmail.

After submitting the questionnaire, you will have to wait several business days. Usually in two or three days the administration sends a decision on your issue. If the answers were correct, you will receive an email with a link to assign a new password.

How to unlink mail from a VK page from a computer

How to unlink email from a VK page from a computer? This requires:

• Open your profile settings;
• In the “General” account settings, click “Change” in the email section;

• Then you will need to enter a new email, confirm the change operation via phone, and then follow the link in the letter that VK will send to the specified email address.

In general, you can unlink mail from a VK account from a computer in the same way as it is done in a mobile application. Now you know how to change your email in VK.

Instead of my mail someone else's is opened

It also happens that you go to the mail.ru website, and someone’s mail is already open there.

This happens when someone else previously entered their box and did not close it. It turns out that you see other people's letters, but cannot access your own. There are three ways to solve this problem:

• Add your box
• Log out of someone else's mail
• Login to your mailbox via incognito mode

Adding your mailbox means connecting one more mail to Mail. It turns out that you leave someone else’s mail and enter your own. Thus, two boxes will be open on the computer at once.

1. Open the mail.ru website and click on the small arrow next to someone else’s email address.

2. Select Add Mailbox.

3. Enter your address (login) and password in the window. Click "Login".

Now two boxes will be open at the same time. You can switch between them through the upper right corner of the site.

Exiting someone else's mailbox means closing it in the browser. Mail will still work, but you will close it on a specific computer.

In order to exit someone else's mail, just click on the icon with the image of a door.

Or click on the “exit” sign in the upper right corner of the site.

Of the minuses, it should be noted that not everyone remembers their address and password. And it may happen that you come out of the box, and then the person will not be able to get into it.

For example, you came to visit a friend and he allowed you to use his computer. You go to Mail’s website, and the owner’s mailbox is already open there. If you leave it, you may be doing the person a disservice. In such a situation, I recommend logging into your mail either by adding a mailbox or through incognito mode.

Login to the mailbox via incognito mode. Incognito is an anonymous mode of working on the Internet. When you work in it, your actions are not saved in the browser. This means that another person will not be able to see what sites you visited and what you looked at on the Internet.

And if you open your email in incognito mode, the data from it will not be saved on your computer. It turns out that you will check your own mailbox and not close someone else’s.

Enable incognito mode through the browser menu:

• In Google Chrome: – New window in incognito mode
• In Yandex browser: – Incognito mode
• In Mozilla Firefox: – New private window
• In Opera: – Create a private window

Or you can enter this mode using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shift+N

A new window will open - usually black or gray. This is where you need to work.

Log in to Mail as usual: open the mail.ru website and enter your mailbox information. When finished, simply close the window.

On a note. After starting anonymous mode, two identical browsers will be opened at once. One in normal mode, the other in incognito.

How a social network lost its founder

According to Mail.ru Group CEO Dmitry Grishin, the consolidation of 100% of VKontakte and the end of the shareholder conflict will allow us to focus on the further development of the product: “We respect the results achieved by the VKontakte team and do not plan significant changes either in the team or in the product itself " UCP partner Victoria Lazareva also confirmed that with the completion of this transaction, all disputes between shareholders are over. “I welcome the decision of my former partners to renounce their claims to Telegram and transfer all American assets under my control,” the message quotes former VKontakte CEO Pavel Durov as saying. “For my part, I withdraw all my claims to UCP and congratulate all parties who participated in resolving the situation."

At the end of August, Mail.ru Group reported in its reports for January-June 2014 that in March it acquired 12% of VKontakte from MegaFon CEO Ivan Tavrin for 12.43 billion rubles. Thus, the entire VKontakte during that transaction was valued at 103.6 billion rubles. (or almost $2.9 billion). In December 2013, Pavel Durov sold his shares in VKontakte (12%) to Mr. Tavrin. The latter already in March ceded its stake in VKontakte to Mail.ru Group, which acquired a total of 51.99% of the company’s shares. According to various estimates, the entire VKontakte in April 2013, when the United Capital Partners fund bought 48% of the shares from the company’s co-founders Vyacheslav Mirilashvili and Lev Leviev, was valued at $1.5–2 billion. It turns out that over the year the social network has risen in price by almost $1 billion

Roman Rozhkov, Maria Kolomychenko