This is based on the response received by www.mailjol.com that provides e-mail service in 12 Indian languages and also in English. mailjol's subscriber base comes from different parts of the country and from all over the world. Around 40 per cent of the users are from countries with large populations of Indian origin, namely USA, UK, UAE and Singapore. Subscribers for this service come from nearly 50 different countries that include places like Germany & Finland.

Mailjol expects to garner five per cent of the English language e-mail market in India in the first four months of going online. The company estimates that nearly one million users will subscribe to this service by the year end.

Says Tarun Malaviya, CEO of mithi.com, "the ability to use Indian languages along with English offers a good reason for users of such services to switch from English only e-mail services to mailjol. "We will promote the use of languages because we know from experience that there is a growing need for such solutions and that the use of Indian languages will be one of the key drivers for growth of Internet in India." Malaviya adds.

Mailjol is looking for partnering or acquiring Indian language portals for content and applications. It is also working out an arrangement for a data center to host Indian language sites and applications on the Internet. The proposed Indian language ready data center will provide the resource back -bone for deploying Indian language applications based on the open standards of ISCII/Unicode.

Mailjol's e-mail service works in Assamese, Bengali, Hindi, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil, Telgu and English making it possible for people to exchange messages in more than one language.