Caramail

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

~ the obit ~

Caramail was a french webmail and chat service that ran from 1997 to 2008. For about five or six years in the early 2000s it was the default way french teenagers used the internet. You signed up for a caramail.com email address. You used the chat rooms to talk to strangers. You did the asl thing in the chat rooms (age sex location) before MSN had really arrived in france.

This is another french thing i never used. In turkey we mostly had hotmail and then yahoo for webmail, then mail.com or local turkish providers, and ICQ then MSN for chat. Caramail did not show up here at all. But every french person around my age has stories about caramail chat rooms in the early 2000s.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it had ~

Three things: webmail, chat rooms, and a few bonus services that came and went over the years.

The webmail was a typical late-1990s product. You got an email address ending in @caramail.com, you logged in through your browser, and you could read and send mail. The interface was french. The features were basic. It worked.

The chat rooms were the thing that made caramail famous. They were public web chat rooms organized by topic and region. Music, politics, romance, study, age range, city, region of france. You picked a room, you went in, and you could talk to whoever was there. There were also private chat features for one-on-one conversations.

The cultural impact was that caramail was the first online place a lot of french people ever encountered strangers. People used it to flirt, to find pen pals, to argue about politics, and occasionally to actually meet up in person. It was a step before MSN, where you mostly already knew the people on your contact list.

~ the lycos era ~

In 2000 Lycos Europe bought caramail. The deal made sense at the time. Lycos was buying up local services in european markets to build a portfolio. Caramail was the strongest french teen brand they could grab. It came with millions of users.

Under Lycos the product slowly got worse. Some features were added that did not really fit. Other features were removed. The interface got more cluttered. The original founders had moved on. The replacement product team did not have the same instincts.

By 2005 most of the chat-room culture had moved to MSN, which was free, ran on your desktop instead of a browser, and had real-time notifications. The caramail chat rooms emptied out. The webmail kept going for a while because changing email addresses is annoying, but the service was already dying inside.

~ how it died ~

Lycos Europe announced in 2008 that it was pulling out of most of its european businesses. Caramail was one of the casualties. The shutdown date was 9 december 2008. Users were given a few weeks to download their email and migrate.

There was an attempt to revive caramail under different ownership in the 2010s, but the relaunched version was never the original product, and the cultural moment was gone anyway. The caramail that mattered was the one that died in 2008.

~ what is left ~

Caramail is one of those things that explains a generation in france. If you ask someone french who is between 35 and 50 about their first online identity, there is a real chance the answer involves a caramail email address and a chat room nickname. The whole experience of meeting strangers on the internet, before social networks formalized it, ran through caramail for a few years there.

The closest analog in turkey would be Mynet's chat rooms, which were similar in shape and similar in feel. Different country, same era, same kind of thing. Both are now ghosts.