Alto Mail

» see altomail.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

aol never had a turkish life. the dial-up i grew up on came out of the phone company, ttnet mostly, with no software cd in the box and no walled garden waiting on the other side of the handshake. so aol was always a thing i read about rather than a thing i logged into. by 2012, when alto showed up, aol was a new york media company that most of the world outside america had quietly stopped thinking about.

that is the part worth saying out loud about alto, because the product itself was not a bad idea at all. it launched on 18 october 2012 as an invitation-only web client, and david temkin, who ran mail and mobile at aol, gave the press a line that explains the whole thing: people need a new email address like they need a hole in the head. so alto did not offer one. you signed in with your gmail or yahoo credentials and alto became a face bolted over the account you already had.

the feature everybody wrote about was stacks. alto watched what arrived and dropped it into piles along the edge of the inbox, photos in one, shop receipts in another, and you could define your own rule for anything it got wrong. this was 2012. gmail's tabbed inbox did not arrive until the following may, and nothing on a phone sorted anything. an aol product was briefly ahead of gmail on the one thing gmail was supposed to be good at.

it stayed ahead for about eighteen months. then everyone else shipped the same idea, and alto's problem became the one every third-party mail client eventually meets: you are a layer over somebody else's server, and that somebody can build your feature into the server whenever they feel like it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ stacks ~

the interesting engineering was not the sorting, it was that the sorting ran against imap accounts alto did not own. it read gmail, yahoo, outlook and icloud over standard protocols, plus exchange for people with work mail, and then applied its own classifier on top. no migration, no forwarding, nothing to tell your contacts. that made it trivial to try and equally trivial to abandon, which turned out to be the shape of the whole product.

by 2015 alto had shed the browser-first design and become a phone app with a dashboard of cards on the front: the flight you had booked, the parcel out for delivery. later versions talked to slack and to alexa. every one of those features now sits inside gmail or inside the operating system, shipped by a company that owns the mail server as well as the client.

~ the last november ~

verizon finished buying yahoo in june 2017 and put it in the same box as aol under a new name, oath. what follows an acquisition like that is a spreadsheet of overlapping products, and alto was on it twice: a mail client from the aol side competing with yahoo mail from the yahoo side, neither of them the reason verizon spent the money.

the notice went out on 25 october 2017. the apps came off the stores on 9 november and the service stopped answering on 10 december, five years and two months after the first invitations went out. there was no migration path, because there was nothing to migrate: your mail had never been in alto, it had always been sitting in gmail or yahoo where you left it. you closed the app and the mail was still there. that is either the cleanest shutdown in the history of email or proof that the product never really held anything, and it is honestly both.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »