Bigfoot

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

~ the eulogy ~

I missed Bigfoot entirely, but I had the exact problem it was built for. Between 1998 and the middle 2000s the line at home moved between TTNet and Turknet more than once, with a Superonline stretch in there as well, and every move meant an address that stopped working. What I reached for was what everyone around me reached for, which was a free webmail account that belonged to nobody's phone line. Bigfoot had solved the same thing years earlier and more carefully. I never heard the name at the time.

Lenny Barshack and Jim Hoffman started it in New York in 1995, and the first product was not forwarding at all. It was a directory. In the middle 1990s finding somebody's email address was a real research task, and a searchable index of them looked like a business worth building. The forwarding service arrived in June 1996 under the name Bigfoot for Life, free and paid for by advertising.

Money followed fast. Around $3 million came in from investors including Sam Zell and Herb Allen, then Acxiom put $11 million in during 1997 and Bigfoot restructured itself into a holding company with three businesses underneath it.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

The 1997 feature list reads like somebody inventing a modern mail client from first principles: archiving, spam filtering, an auto-reminder, an auto-responder, and a consolidator that pulled several accounts into one place. All of it was bolted onto an address that had no mailbox behind it.

The pitch was the address itself. An ISP address died when you changed providers and a work address died when you changed jobs, and Bigfoot was the layer that survived both. It is the same argument people now make for owning a domain, made twenty years early and given away for nothing.

~ the unraveling ~

The promise broke in public in 2000. Bigfoot had been handing out addresses on rock.com, a domain it did not control outright, and when that domain was sold to a company with no interest in running a forwarder, those users were told their lifelong addresses would stop resolving. The Register wrote it up that June under a headline about lifelong email lasting under three years, which was roughly how long those particular addresses had lived.

The structural lesson was there for anyone who wanted it. A forwarding address is only as permanent as whoever holds the domain, which means the durability being sold was never the customer's to keep.

~ what it became ~

After the dot-com collapse Bigfoot International was split up and sold in pieces. Michael Gleissner bought bigfoot.com in 2000 and turned the name into Bigfoot Entertainment, a film and fashion operation with a studio in the Philippines that had nothing whatsoever to do with email. The forwarding service came along as an inherited obligation and simply kept running.

It ran that way for another fifteen years without improvement. Users started noticing mail arriving weeks late in December 2015, then longer gaps through February 2016, and the support threads from that stretch read like people trying to establish whether anybody was still employed there. Bigfoot for Life ended in 2016 with no announcement anyone can point to.

~ the next chapter ~

What removed the need was not a better forwarder. Gmail arrived in 2004 and made your address something you got from a company with no interest in your phone line, which is the entire problem Bigfoot existed to route around. By the time the forwarding stopped, the thing it had been selling since 1996 had been the default for a decade.

The idea survives anyway, just repriced. Anyone buying a domain today so their address will outlive their employer is running the Bigfoot argument with a registrar in the position that Bigfoot used to occupy.

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