Iran's startup community weighs in on new 'national email service'
A week ago, Iran announced a new “national email service” that
will require all citizens to register in order to “safely”
communicate with government officials, The Guardian
reports.
"For mutual interaction and communication between the government
and the people, from now on every Iranian will receive a special
email address along with their postcode," Mohammad Hasan Nami,
Iran's minister for information and communication technology, was
quoted as saying by Mehr news agency.
Those who register at mail.post.ir can receive an @post.ir address;
the service is designed to accommodate 100 million users, which is
more than twice cover Iran’s estimated 42 million internet users.
With a 50MB capacity, it isn’t necessarily designed for heavy use;
however, it can be upgraded to 2GB. Interestingly, it’s not
free.
The program is reminiscent of previous plans to
launch a “national internet,” although, in light of the
previous failure of a similar service, mail.iran.ir, some are
skeptical. The new service doesn’t even offer encryption, web and
media researcher Amin Sabeti told The Guardian.
A member of the startup community in Tehran that we spoke to
agreed. “The Iranian government has tried many times to set up
projects such as a ‘national search engine’ and ‘national email,’
however, these services need to be adopted by users and cannot be
pushed or forced.”
Other services, such as Iran’s biggest social network, Cloob,
have also offered email services exclusive to Iran. Although Cloob,
which boasts an estimated 2.5 million users, is far behind global
competitors such as Facebook in terms of both quality and number of
users (which might reach 9 million users despite being blocked),
it’s seen better adoption than government initiatives, he says.
Yet perhaps banks will play a role in persuading users to join the
new service, says Amir-Esmaeil Bozorgzadeh, Managing Partner at
Conovi, a digital consultancy
and incubator associated with Pars Online, a Tehran-based internet
service provider.
“Banks are increasingly trying to disassociate foreign email
services from their customers' accounts, so demand from banks would
be one way in which Iranians could be enticed to a domestic or
national email service,” he said from Dubai.
“Otherwise,” Bozorgzadeh added, “it would be very difficult to get
users to adopt the service as a new habit, as Yahoo and Gmail are
incredibly popular services, respectively adopted by an estimated
70% and 30% of internet users.”
It remains to be seen whether new president Hassan Rouhani, who has welcomed Facebook, will support the program once he takes office in August.