Take your data, untie your mail and run with qip.ru

Because QIP seems to be a RIP

After reading the two sentences from the headline, some of Habr's guests will experience a kind of " Mandela effect ". After all, according to popular opinion, the QIP project has long been dead. And no! He completely existed and even worked more or less, until recently ...

The once-popular portal QIP.ru, which has now lost its former glory, which at a certain stage included a news aggregator, forums, mail, instant messenger, photo hosting and other services, has finally come to a complete decline. From about August 20, 2018, constant interruptions in authorization in services, access to mailboxes and delivery of letters began. As of September 25, 2018 QIP.ru periodically goes into complete inaccessibility up to several days.
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At one of the moments of “enlightenment”, when the site started working again, the current owners posted an advertisement for the sale of domains that form the portal mail pool. The announcement hung a couple of days between several downtimes, and then disappeared.

Technical support is not provided to users. The technical support section is not available. No warnings about EOL ( End of Life - completion of maintenance) or long technical work was sent. Here is such an inglorious end.

UPD In the comments offered instructions for survival.
UPD of September 29, 2018 Now the portal is relatively functional, and the inscription appeared on it:

The project was sold to Prestige Media LLC. We update server hardware. From October 1, 2018, the project will continue full-fledged work and development. Everything will be fine :) All the world! :)

UPD from December 21, 2018 Kipov domain mail was transferred to Yandex!

The history of rise and fall. Who is responsible?

According to Wikipedia , the project began work on September 1, 1999, when the registration of mailboxes of 20 MB in the domains pisem.net and mailru.com was opened. At the moment (the beginning of 2018), has provided email addresses in more than 22 domains.

July 1, 2000 the project was acquired by the RBC group of companies.

The project was named Pochta.ru in 2004. The merger of the nm.ru project and Pochta.ru took place on February 25, 2009. The merger of the project QIP.ru and Mail.ru took place on December 9, 2009. The main domain of the project since 2009 is qip.ru.

In 2013, the official portal community in the VC ceased to be updated.

In March 2015, RBC sold a number of services to private investors. The list of items includes the portal QIP.ru, News.qip.ru, educational database 5ballov.qip.ru, service test selections Aeterna.qip.ru, astrological service Horo.qip.ru, service of postcards Kards.qip.ru, Radio .qip.ru, Photobank Photo.qip.ru, service for creating screenshots of Shot.qip.ru, forums Borda.ru and Forum24.ru, service for storing and exchanging data Files.qip.ru and mail qip.ru.

In June 2015, the domain pochta.ru was sold to RBC Russian Post through an intermediary company . But QIP.ru users have retained access to their email accounts as a result of a tripartite agreement . From September 2017, the pochta.ru postal service of the domain stopped working with new letters (new letters arrived until November 2017), access to email accounts was maintained on the website www.qip.ru

At the end of August 2018, a continuous series of serious problems began with the QIP.ru portal and its services, which can hardly be called “temporary difficulties”. The term “epic failure” is most appropriate. In the pauses between the complete inaccessibility of the main site showed notifications of "technical work" and "moving to another data center."

According to " Noviye Izvestiya " as of August 2018, the owner of the well-known Qip Messenger in the past is Media World LLC, which also owns an email mail.qip.ru and a service for creating and using forums borda.ru.

What is dangerous?

The situation quickly changes from bad to worse. If the announcement of the sale of domains is not a hoax, then instead of denial of service and the likely loss of data stored on project servers, users may face much more serious consequences. There is no guarantee that the new domain owners will be honest and decent. What prevents them from once again raising mail servers on domains received at their disposal and starting to receive someone else's mail? Surely there are people who still have valuable accounts tied to mailboxes from the domain pool QIP.ru. Or such a mailbox is listed as a backup in another mail service and you can recover the password to it.

By the way, the portal qip.ru is the operator of personal data and the current leadership of the portal potentially puts these data at risk by their actions. I wonder when the plot will interest RosKomNadzor or another regulatory authority?

Abandoned users

In the official community of the QIP portal on the social network in Vkontakte, the last post is dated April 11, 2013. And in the comments to the old topics thousands of fresh complaints from users who have become hostages of the service, remain unanswered.

Maybe this is just a step in the evolution of the service?

Trying to understand what the portal is waiting for, I decided to look for information related to the resource. By driving in search engines of various combinations of search phrases with the word QIP, I discovered several seemingly innocuous fresh vacancies from the Evolution company: a PHP programmer once and twice .

Here is the first one, at the time of creating the screenshot, the QIP portal is mentioned several times in it:



It looks pretty harmless. And now let's see what the potential employer of Evolution LLC itself writes about itself.



Tax, another crypto-oligarchs and advertisers. There is nothing directly connected with the messenger or mail. And it is not clear what will happen with the service and the brand as a whole, if Evolution really got to QIP.ru

And what do you think?

PS It is unlikely that the mail will begin to go to alternative domains QIP.ru in the near future. Many domain names have lost MX-records from the config (as of September 25, 2018).