Another.com

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

~ the obituary ~

Every one of the 6,596 domains another.com offered in May 2000 ended in .co.uk. The suffix is the distance. The joke in a cheekymonkey.co.uk address only lands if you are British. In 2000 I was in Turkey choosing a Hotmail handle like everyone else I knew, and the British free email market was running its own experiments that nobody outside it ever saw.

The pitch was plain enough. "Welcome to another.com, the free email service, accessible from anywhere, that lets you express yourself by creating your own personal email addresses." You typed a word into a box and it handed you a domain: type holiday, get onthebeach.co.uk. The homepage carried a sample rack of them, cheekymonkey.co.uk, hippychick.co.uk, hungover.co.uk, getalife.co.uk, 0-0-7.co.uk, and then a link reading "6,596 more domain names". By September 2001 the count had passed 12,000 and the front page was running a chart countdown and promoting djmail.co.uk to music fans.

On 17 May 2013 someone on EmailDiscussions.com opened a thread looking for a replacement: "Another.com, my web-based email provider of nearly 15 years is closing down." The poster noted they could find no record of the service anywhere on that forum, and took that to mean very few people would be affected. The archive puts the ending inside a four-week window. On 14 June 2013 the apex still carried a webmail login link in its top corner; by 14 July it answered with 669 bytes.

~ the case file ~

~ 6,596 domain names ~

The catalog was the product. By 2006 the front page had become a directory you browsed rather than a pitch you read: A through Z, then 0-9, then themed shelves for Sport, Travel, Corporate, Seasonal, Entertainment, Food and Drink, plus a Top 500. Underneath sat a login box with an SSL checkbox and a link to a system status page. A site adds a status page once its users have begun noticing outages.

~ funmail limited ~

Companies House has the whole arc in three names. The company was incorporated on 4 November 1998 as DC Tech Limited. On 16 July 1999 it became Funmail Limited. On 18 May 2000 it became Another.com Limited, eight days after the archive first catches the another.com brand live on the web.

Funmail did not entirely leave. A URL captured on the site in June 2012 still carries the query parameter o=funmail, twelve years after it stopped being the trading name. Old systems keep their first vocabulary in places nobody has a reason to look.

~ before jan 1st 2009 ~

The terms page from 16 May 2013 is the clearest surviving picture of what the company had turned into. It greets you with two login boxes. Customers who signed up before 1 January 2009 get a webmail login. Customers who signed up after it get cPanel. The terms attached to the first box are dated June 2006 and still describe the original service, "an extensive range of domain names which gives you the ability to create your own email address", payable annually in advance.

Another.com did not go out of business. It changed what business it was in, twice, and kept the old inbox alive for subscribers who had already paid, until that stopped making sense. By January 2012 the homepage was no longer selling email at all. It was selling domains, advertising "UK's largest base of quality generic co.uk's" and positioning itself against Sedo and Moniker as a faster way to reach a seller.

~ what the apex sells now ~

another.com answers on plain HTTP and nowhere else, and the page it returns is a listing. Spaceship wants $650,000 for the domain, or $70,000 down and $9,692.30 a month for sixty-five months. Over HTTPS the host fails to negotiate at all, a fair measure of the attention the address now gets. Another.com Limited remains an active company on the register, filed under other telecommunications activities, from an address in Altrincham rather than the twenty-ninth floor of One Canada Square.

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