Bluebottle

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

~ the goodbye ~

Bluebottle came out of Melbourne in August 2002, from a small company called Bluebottle Systems and its founder Robert Pickup. The launch press release made one promise, mail from known senders only. When somebody new wrote to you, Bluebottle held the message and sent them a verification request. They could answer it, or reply with your full name, and after that they were on your allowed list. Everyone else sat in a pending folder. Pickup's own line in the release was "I now only get emails from Mum."

The method is called challenge/response and Bluebottle did not invent it, but in 2002 spam was getting worse every month and a mailbox that simply refused strangers sounded like a cure. It could also guard an existing Hotmail or Yahoo account by passing that mail through the same filter. In March 2003 the company put the anti-spam system under an open-source license and said it had been "100% effective" since launch.

When it launched, email for most people I knew in Turkey meant Hotmail, because MSN Messenger ran on it, and an Australian inbox that asked strangers to prove themselves never came up. I learned it existed because a reader wrote in. It was their first email address, and they kept it about three years.

~ the chronicle ~

~ free for a while ~

At first it was a 14-day trial and then a paid plan with 10 MB. In January 2004 it became free for individuals, and by that August the free account had 250 MB and worked with any mail client over POP or IMAP. It could also watch over up to three outside accounts. In 2005 it added SMS alerts for new mail and a "Trusted Delivery" label that marked each message as trusted or not, with an Outlook plug-in. The company itself had been renamed Trusted Delivery Pty Ltd by then, still in Melbourne, with its servers in Texas.

~ the catch ~

Our reader left for AOL because the spam got too bad, which sounds odd for a service sold as spam free. Bluebottle's own shutdown letter explains it. Spam did not reach the inbox, it piled up in the pending folder next to the real mail from people who had not answered their challenge yet, and customers had been asking for that folder to be filtered too. The company never got to it. Challenge systems have a second problem, since spam comes with forged senders, and the challenges end up going to people who never wrote to you at all.

~ two letters ~

The first came in June 2008. Pickup's new company, Bluebottle Solutions, had bought the service back from Trusted Delivery, and the free tier would end on 20 June "to reduce the significant resources required to manage the free service". Paid accounts stayed, at $9.95 or $24.95 a year.

The second came in January 2016 and gave a closing date of 30 June. "We simply did not have the necessary engineering or financial resources to ensure the service remained secure," it said, and it pointed customers to Fastmail. The login page was still being served in early July. By 18 August the site said only "Bluebottle is Closed", with the logo and a support address under it.

credit to darkocean, whose first inbox this was. thank you for writing in.

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