Foxmail is a

freeware Freeware is software, most often proprietary, that is distributed at no monetary cost to the end user. There is no agreed-upon set of rights, license, or EULA that defines ''freeware'' unambiguously; every publisher defines its own rules for the f ...

e-mail client An email client, email reader or, more formally, message user agent (MUA) or mail user agent is a computer program used to access and manage a user's email. A web application which provides message management, composition, and reception functio ...

developed by

Tencent Tencent Holdings Ltd. () is a Chinese multinational technology and entertainment conglomerate and holding company headquartered in Shenzhen. It is one of the highest grossing multimedia companies in the world based on revenue. It is also the w ...

History

Foxmail was originally written by

Allen Zhang Zhang Xiaolong (), also known as Allen Zhang, is a Chinese computer programmer and technology executive. He is known for leading the developments of WeChat and Foxmail. He is a senior executive vice president and president of Weixin Group at Tenc ...

(张小龙), an alumnus of

Huazhong University of Science and Technology The Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST; ) is a public research university located in Guanshan Subdistrict, Hongshan District, Wuhan, Hubei province, China. As a national key university directly affiliated to the Ministry of E ...

Wuhan Wuhan (, ; ; ) is the capital of Hubei, Hubei Province in the China, People's Republic of China. It is the largest city in Hubei and the most populous city in Central China, with a population of over eleven million, the List of cities in China ...

. Foxmail was acquired in 2005 by Tencent Holdings.

Usage

According to a 2001

Sina.com Sina Corporation (, "new wave") is a Chinese technology company. Sina operates four major business lines: Sina Weibo, Sina Mobile, Sina Online, and Sinanet. Sina has over 100 million registered users worldwide. Sina was recognized by '' South ...

survey, Foxmail had a 32.92% market share in China. In 2003, in a joint press-release with

Verisign Verisign Inc. is an American company based in Reston, Virginia, United States that operates a diverse array of network infrastructure, including two of the Internet's thirteen root nameservers, the authoritative registry for the , , and gener ...

promoting

Internationalized domain name An internationalized domain name (IDN) is an Internet domain name that contains at least one label displayed in software applications, in whole or in part, in non-latin script or alphabet, such as Arabic, Bengali, Chinese (Mandarin, simplified ...

s, the authors' reported over 3 million daily Foxmail users in China. (For perspective, the

CNNIC The China Internet Network Information Center (), or CNNIC, is the administrative agency responsible for domain registry affairs of .cn under the Cyberspace Administration of China. Founded on 3 June 1997, it is now a government department based in ...

reported a total number of 35 million Internet users in China in January 2002.) Foxmail tutorials are found in several Internet literacy books for the Chinese market.

Reviews

The Dutch edition of ''

PC Magazine ''PC Magazine'' (shortened as ''PCMag'') is an American computer magazine published by Ziff Davis. A print edition was published from 1982 to January 2009. Publication of online editions started in late 1994 and have continued to the present d ...

'' reported that version 6.0 of Foxmail occasionally sends email usage data to datacollect.foxmail.com.cn, but otherwise generally described it as an "excellent email client", recommending version 5.0.8 (the last one before the acquisition), which is not affected by this issue. Foxmail 5 violates RFC 822 (and 2822, 5322) by putting 8-bit characters in the subject and address header fields. It is said to support

Chinese Domain Name The Chinese Domain Name Consortium, created on 19 May 2000, is a collaboration among the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China (Taiwan), Hong Kong and Macau to come up with a standard way to create a domain name system for Chinese charac ...

standards from RFC3454, RFC3490, RFC3491, and RFC3492 published in March 2003 by

IETF The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a standards organization for the Internet and is responsible for the technical standards that make up the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). It has no formal membership roster or requirements and a ...

."FAQ for Chinese Domain Name". ''cnnic.net.cn''. China Internet Network Information Center. 10 October 2005. Retrieved at on 2 June 2011.

References

External links

*
Wang Once Again Critiques the New Features of Foxmail 6.5 (王者再出击 Foxmail 6.5新功能试用)

(Chinese) Windows email clients Tencent software {{software-type-stub