docomo Web Mail (ドコモwebメール)

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

~ the last words ~

On 29 March 2010, NTT docomo and NTT Resonant put out a joint release announcing a free webmail service for docomo subscribers. The subtitle did the whole pitch in one line: a free webmail you could use from both a PC and a phone. It opened on Wednesday 14 April with a gift card lottery attached, and the release is still live on docomo.ne.jp today, sixteen years later, describing a service that has not existed since 2012.

The full name was docomo Web Mail powered by goo, and the trailing clause was load-bearing. It ran on NTT Resonant's goo Mail platform, which at that point was the second most used webmail in Japan. docomo did not build a mail system. It took the one already running inside the same corporate group, put its own logo on the header, then gave it away to anyone holding a FOMA line with an i-mode contract.

That eligibility rule is the reason this service is harder to picture than it should be. You could not sign up from the open web. You went into the i-mode menu on your handset, found the webmail entry, and the address was issued to you there, one per contract, free. If you did not have a Japanese phone on Japan's largest carrier you were never going to see the signup screen at all, and the service did not want anything else from you, not a card, not an application.

Then it ran for twenty-eight months and stopped.

~ the record ~

~ two gigabytes and a FOMA line ~

What you got was a good deal for 2010. Two gigabytes of storage and a ceiling of one hundred thousand messages. Attachments up to twenty megabytes. A dedicated i-appli so the phone client was not just a cut-down web page. You could point it at fifteen outside accounts, meaning your provider mail plus whatever other webmail you had accumulated, and read all of it from the one box, which was the actual sales argument: check your mail in one place and stop visiting four sites.

The interface was goo Mail's, with docomo's wordmark and the words "powered by goo" underneath it in the header. Mail was grouped automatically by who you had been exchanging it with, and newsletters could be dropped into folders without much work. There was a POP and SMTP path too, so Outlook or Thunderbird could talk to it like any other mailbox.

~ the mailbox that filled itself ~

The feature that made it a carrier product rather than another free mailbox was the i-mode link. Mail you sent and received on the handset, through your i-mode address, was copied into the webmail box automatically. You did nothing. The phone kept doing what it always did and a browsable archive of it accumulated on a PC you could sit down at later, with a notification going back to the i-mode address when something new arrived.

That solved a specific Japanese problem. The i-mode address lived on the handset and the handset had a small screen and a smaller keypad, so years of correspondence sat in a device nobody could search properly. docomo already sold a paid answer to the same problem under the name i-mode.net, which pushed the whole i-mode mailbox onto a PC browser for a monthly fee. This one was free and it did less, and the two of them ran side by side for the whole of its short life.

~ the notice docomo never published ~

On 5 March 2012 the end was announced, and the place it was announced is the strange part. There is no docomo press release for it. The launch got one, numbered and archived and still being served sixteen years on. The shutdown got a post on a goo blog called "notices from docomo Web Mail", which gave the reason as concentrating management resources in line with changes in the internet market, smartphones included.

The wind-down was orderly and slow. New signups closed at eleven o'clock on the morning of 13 March 2012, which meant the service had accepted new users for not quite twenty-three months. From 7 June subscribers could pull their mail down through a desktop client, and they were told to do the moving themselves. On 27 August 2012 at eleven in the morning it ended, and dwmail.jp went over to a one-page notice saying so in the past tense, with the copyright line reading 2010 to 2012.

Three weeks earlier, nothing in particular had happened. There was no breach and no lawsuit. docomo had launched a free PC mailbox for feature phone customers ten weeks before the iPhone 4 reached Japanese shops on a rival network, and would not sell an iPhone itself until September 2013. The mailbox was built for a handset that was on its way out, by a carrier that could see it going and could not yet do anything about it. The domain spent the next few years serving sponsored listings.

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