<p>Yahoo! has decided its Chinese customers don't need their emailaccounts any more, and is closing the service in the country.</p><p>A statement from Yahoo!Mail tells users that they will have four months, until 19August, to save their emails and switch to another provider. Thecompany suggests moving to AliCloud -- if users do so, any mailsent to the old account address will still be received in the newAliCloud inbox up until the end of 2014.</p><p>AliCloud is provided by Alibaba, the giant web company that runsmany of China's largest ecommerce sites, including eBay-like Taobao(the tenth-most-viewed site in the world according to Alexa) andthe payment platform Alipay, which had more than 700 million registered users as of September 2012(far surpassing the 128 million users ofPaypal).</p><p>Yahoo! Mail has been available in China for more than ten years,but Alibaba and Yahoo! struck a strategic partnership deal inOctober 2005 that saw the Chinese firm take responsibility forrunning Yahoo!'s key Chinese web products. Yahoo! paid Alibaba $1billion (656 million), and in return gained a 40 percent share ofAlibaba stock.</p><p><a href="http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-04/22/yahoo-china-email">Keep reading...</a></p><p>Read also:</p><p><a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/dougyoung/2013/04/22/yahoo-shutters-china-email%EF%BC%8Cwithdrawal-looms/">Yahoo Shutters China EmailWithdrawal Looms</a> (Forbes)</p><p>Explore: <a href="http://news.google.com/news/more?ncl=dfmgz0zde5S-fSMaHt8ZzcvSk9p_M&ned=us">39 additional articles.</a></p>