au one Mail (au one メール)

» see mail.auone.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

KDDI announced au one Mail on 30 July 2007 and the pitch was a number. Takahashi Makoto, then running the consumer business and now the company's president, said that at twenty messages of two hundred characters a day you could store a hundred years of mail in it. He called it hundred year mail, something you could stay with for life. The point he was making was about loss: an au handset address died every time you changed handsets, and this one would not, so the pointless exchanges from your school years and the mail you sent your parents as a child would still be there to page through like an album.

It opened on 27 September 2007 along with the au one portal it was named after, and on the first day so many people arrived at once that registering was difficult and the launch mascot campaign had to be postponed. It was free. It gave you an address at auone.jp on top of whatever your handset already had, and the mail itself ran on Google's machines, with KDDI handling the members and Google handling the servers. Storage started at 2GB and had reached 6GB by December.

KDDI announced the end on 6 December 2012, in a release about this service and nothing else. New registrations closed on 31 March 2013, along with the ability to use it from an ordinary au feature phone. The rest of it stopped on 30 September 2013, six years and three days after it opened. The reason given, in full, was that the number of people using it had fallen.

~ the record ~

~ the footnote under the hundred years ~

KDDI liked the phrase enough to put it in a press release of its own in January 2008, when the service got emoji. The phrase came with a note attached at the bottom. It explained that the hundred years assumed about sixty short messages a day with no attachments, and then said directly that this was not a guarantee that the service would be usable for a hundred years.

That note went out five years and eight months before the service closed.

~ one hundred and eighty days ~

The mailbox that was meant to hold your life had a timer on it. Leave the account alone for a hundred and eighty days and it was closed, with the mail deleted. The help pages carried a warning that is worse than the rule: reading your mail over POP or IMAP did not count as activity and did not reset the clock. Someone who had wired the account into a mail client, which is exactly what a person storing a hundred years of mail would do, could have the whole account closed underneath them while using it every day.

Several other things also erased everything. Ending your au contract did it, and so did giving up the au ID the mailbox hung from. During the wind-down KDDI shortened the inactivity window from a hundred and eighty days to ninety.

~ what the brand did and what the mail did ~

The brand in the name went first. KDDI retired au one on 1 March 2012, turning the portal into au Portal and au one ID into au ID. The mail kept the dead brand in its name for another nineteen months, and by the end its own shutdown page was headed with one name while the text underneath described the other. From 10 December 2012 some feature phones reaching for it got a raw Google account login screen, or a bare 403, and KDDI published instructions about clearing browser history.

Nothing was carried over when it closed. After 30 September you could not read what you had already received, let alone send, and KDDI's advice was for each person to save their own mail first, by forwarding it somewhere else or exporting it to Gmail. A replacement called au Web Mail did arrive on 30 June 2014, a full year after the end of the window KDDI had first promised it in. It was for handset addresses only and nothing moved into it. For anyone outside the paid au Smart Pass tier it offered 200MB and five thousand messages, against the 6GB they had been given for free in 2007.

One detail is worth stating plainly for anyone reading this from outside Japan. A PC could use au one Mail with no au contract at all. Among Japanese carrier products of that period, very few were open to a stranger abroad who simply wanted to register. The part of it that was open to everybody was the part that nobody abroad had any reason to want, and an address at auone.jp was only worth having if the handset in your pocket was on that network.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »