Thought Dead but Alive... 'Cheollian' to End Next Month "Sincere Thanks to Customers"

User Email Migration Support

The portal service 'Cheollian' is scheduled to be discontinued at the end of October.

On the 10th, Cheollian's operator 'MediaLog' announced in a recent notice that "the Cheollian service will end on October 31."

The company explained, "Despite efforts to continue the service amid a market situation where portal services we worked with are shutting down one by one, it became difficult to maintain high-quality mail services due to changes in the business environment, leading to the difficult decision to terminate the service."

[Image source=Cheollian capture]

Accordingly, starting from the 11th, Cheollian will open mail/address book backup functions and accept applications for mail auto-forwarding and mail address change notifications to support existing users in saving their data and transferring emails.

From the 1st of next month, Cheollian's basic fee will be waived, and from September 1, additional services such as text messaging (SMS), news (video), and people/fortune-telling will be sequentially terminated. Then, from October 1, sending and receiving of Cheollian mail will be suspended, and the service will be completely terminated on the 31st of the same month.

Cheollian will become a memory after 39 years since the start of its PC communication service in 1985. With this, all three major services that once opened the era of domestic PC communication will disappear into history.

PC communication is a technology that supports communication between PCs using telephone internet. It was developed in the United States in the 1970s and began full-scale service in Korea in the mid-1980s.

First, Cheollian and KETEL (the predecessor of HiTEL) were launched, followed by HiTEL and NowNuri, and at one point, the PC communication market was a three-way competition among Cheollian, HiTEL, and NowNuri. HiTEL discontinued its service in 2007, and NowNuri in 2012, leaving only Cheollian barely maintaining its presence.

PC communication enjoyed its golden age until the 1990s, but with the rise of the internet in the 2000s, users sharply declined. Some companies started their own portal services, but even those failed to regain past influence, being overshadowed by internet companies.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.