Russian webmail services Mail.Ru and Yandex.Pochta ranked fourth and fifth in Europe in June 2012 in unique visitors, telecom and IT industry news portal Cnews reports.

In June, Mail.Ru’s audiences reportedly reached 42.77 million unique visitors; Yandex.Pochta estimated its unique visitors at 25.14 million. While European webmail services generally staged 14% year-on-year growth in June, the Mail.Ru and Yandex.Pochta audiences grew an estimated 22% and 37%, respectively.

For comparison, the audience of Hotmail, rebranded now as Outlook.com, grew a modest 1%; Gmail added 18%; and the Yahoo! webmail audience grew 4%. So, the two Russian companies demonstrated in June the fastest year-on-year unique visitor growth in the European continent, Cnews reports citing a comScore study.

The time of stay at each of the two Russian services also reportedly increased in June. With Mail.Ru it was up 15%, and up a hefty 58% with Yandex.Pochta. For comparison, with Hotmail it was down 14%; up just 7% with Gmail; and Yahoo! showed a healthy growth of 29%. However, the average stay at a webmail interface shrank in Europe by 6% y/y to 106.4 minutes, the study says.