Maktoob was an online services company founded in Amman, Jordan. Maktoob.com was known as the first Arabic–English email service provider.[1] In 2009, Yahoo! acquired Maktoob.com, making it Yahoo!'s official arm in the MENA region.[2] As of 31 January 2023, Yahoo! Maktoob has been shut down; and therefore no longer publishes content.
Yahoo! Maktoob provided the following online services: News (Yahoo! Maktoob News), sports news (Yahoo! Maktoob Sport), a blogging platform (Yahoo! Maktoob Blog), a social network (Yahoo! Maktoob As7ab Maktoob), a bilingual online research community (Yahoo! Maktoob Research), a marriage portal (Yahoo! Maktoob Bentelhalal), a travel portal (Yahoo! Maktoob Travel) and a casual gaming platform (Yahoo! Maktoob Games).
History
Early days
Maktoob was founded in 1999 by Samih Toukan and Hussam Khoury, offering a webmail service featuring Arabic language support—a unique feature at the time when other free email services lacked such capability.[3]