Extraordinary Genius

“Manager Ding, what’s the good news you want to tell me?” Feng Yu looks at Ding Lei with a smile. What good news is so important for Ding Lei to visit him at his office.

Ding Lei exclaimed excitedly. “Manager Feng, we have made a breakthrough for our email account technology. Our email accounts’ storage capacity can reach 1G now!”

Huh? 1G email account? This means China’s email accounts will be entering the G era now?!

1G emails had appeared in the US, Europe, Korea, Japan, and many other countries, and China could not catch up with them. But in Feng Yu’s previous life, China is way backward. The earliest 1G email account is introduced by Yahoo China.

Email technology had developed from fee-charging to free-of-charge, and many additional features were added. But the main purpose of email accounts is still sending and receiving email accounts.

When some companies switched to emails, they realized the email account capacity is too low.

In Feng Yu’s previous life, many companies’ internal departments had to use emails, and some also used shared company account.

But all these will not work now, as the email’s storage capacity is too small.

Very often, people cannot receive emails after their mailbox is full. When the technology improved, users can receive new emails when their mailbox is full, but the earliest email will be deleted.

In Feng Yu’s previous life, many people had used their email accounts as a storage tool. But this is very troublesome now.

Some people will still do it by creating several email accounts. A few email accounts are for storing important information, and people often forget the passwords and login ID.

The solution these people used is to write the login ID and password in a notebook. But this will defeat the purpose of having a password. Overall, emails are still very restricted and inconvenient now.

Before Feng Yu’s rebirth, the lowest email storage capacity is 3G. It can be increased by binding it to a mobile phone for unlimited storage.

In that era, most companies will have a corporate account for storing and sending important information.

Feng Yu saw Ding Lei’s excited expression and decided to ruin it. “You are so excited over 1G? Other countries have 2G storage mailboxes. You are still too far away from them.”

Ding Lei’s excitement died down. The gap between him and overseas is so wide?! But he believes after achieving 1G, he can narrow the gap and catch up with those overseas companies within a few years!

“Manager Ding, have you consider getting other sources of income other than advertisements?”

“We are not the only email company, and we cannot charge fees for emails. Although our technology is still the best in China, most people will not use high storage accounts. Other than advertisements, what other income can we get?” Ding Lei thought for a while and could not think of other ways to get income.

“Manager Ding, users are registering accounts with all sorts of names. How can we let people know which company the email account belongs to when they see the email address?” Feng Yu asked with a smile.

“The suffix. Our company’s and Sina’s suffix are different.”

“Alright. Then this suffix belongs to NetEase, and people can tell it’s your company’s email account. This is also a good way to promote NetEase too. Why can’t corporations have their own corporate email accounts?”

“Ah? Corporate email accounts? Then they must set up their own exchange server and get their own domain names. They also need to have a server. Why would they spend money when there are free services available?”

“Safety! With my own server, it will be safer. Also, the cost of a server is nothing to a big corporation. But the good thing with companies having their own email server is they can monitor all incoming and outgoing mails of the company. They can also set the capacity of each account and delete or shut down your account. This way, after a staff resigns, they can no longer send emails using the company’s name…”

Ding Lei thinks hard at this suggestion. This corporate mailbox seems interesting. Manager Feng is asking him to provide this service to those large corporations.

“Manager Feng, do you think there will be a market for this service?”

“If you can do this, all the companies under Tai Hua Holdings will rent your servers. But the bottom line is this server must be safe and stable. It must also be able to receive overseas emails. That means you need an overseas gateway server.”

In the future, many small companies start to provide email services. Putting the security issues aside, their email accounts cannot send or receive overseas emails. The emails are either cut halfway, or there’s an error message. Some did not even have error messages.

“This should not be a problem. Is there anything I should look out for?”

“System upgrades. The mailbox must provide upgrade services and include after-sales services. You can provide a free period and charge them reasonable fees after that.”

Ding Lei nodded. “This is also not a problem. Our system upgrades are surely the best, and a small corporate account upgrade should not take too long.”

“There’s another important issue to take note of. Your system must differentiate spam mails and have anti-virus features. This will attract more users. Of course, I know this difficult, but the email-borne virus is abundant now. If people discover our emails are spreading viruses, it will affect our reputation.”

“I understand about the anti-virus. But what do you mean by spam mails?”

“It is those useless advertisement emails sent to every account through servers. It will take up a lot of space and let your users cannot find the useful emails.”

Ding Lei looks at Feng Yu weirdly. You are the one who told us we can profit by sending out advertisements through our servers. But you are telling me to stop advertisements. Does this mean our mailbox can only have our advertisements?

But this is a great idea. This way, the company can charge more for email advertisements. Also, they are providing free email services. Why should they let others benefit from it?

“Ok. I know what to do. Oh, I need to inform you another thing. Our online game is entering Beta testing. I heard you are good at game development and design. Can you help us check and see how we can improve our game?”

“Sure. What’s the name of your game?” Feng Yu is excited to play a new game.

“Fantasy Westward Journey.”

Translator’s notes:

Fantasy Westward Journey