Beijing ISM has reported that it had registered ISM Gmail before Google registered its Gmail Service.


Beijing ISM Internet Technology Development Co., a small Chinese email provider and domain registrar based in western Beijing, offers an email service called, ISM Gmail service.

ISM Gmail appears similar to Google Gmail in many ways. It uses a similar logo and is a free email service.

Like Google’s Gmail, the ISM Gmail service uses a logo comprised of blue, yellow, red, and green letters.

ISM claims that its Gmail service was started first. According to whois information provided by the China Internet Network Information Center, CNNIC, the domain name, gmail.cn, was registered on Aug. 1, 2003. Google’s Gmail was registered on April 1, 2004.

The resemblance between the two Gmails stops at the logo and the appearance of the sign in page. Beyond that things look quite different.

In ISN Gmail there are no conversation threads, no labels and no search function. There’s less space too. Instead of the 2 GB of storage space that Google makes available to its Gmail users, ISM offers 300KB of storage.

According to a spoke person of ISM Gmail, this service has more than 300,000 users and ISM has spent 20 million renminbi ($2.5 million) developing the technology for the service.

The ISM Gmail service is meant to be multilingual and currently supports two languages: English and the simplified version of Chinese. In the future, ISM plans to expand the number of supported languages to more than 50, including traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

 

 

 

 

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