EresMás

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

~ the goodbye ~

EresMás reached me the way most dead Spanish brands reach anybody outside Spain, as the part after the @ in somebody's address. A name with no product attached to it any more. That is what it had been for roughly twenty years by the time Orange finally switched the mail servers off in September 2025.

It was not always a suffix. On 21 March 2000 Retevisión, the company that had broken Telefónica's monopoly on Spanish long distance, put its consumer internet operation behind one green brand. The brand had already been through a name: it started as Iddeo and then Alehop before somebody settled on eresMás. Underneath it sat a set of early Spanish providers that Retevisión had simply bought, Servicom and Redes TB among them, welded into a single portal with a single login.

It worked immediately, which was the part nobody expected. Five months after launch eresMás claimed more than a million access users and something close to 40 percent of everybody online in Spain. A year in it was at a million and a half. By 2001 the number was above two million across the free tier and the paid ones, and Retevisión had launched Spain's first dial-up flat rate at 2,600 pesetas a month.

That flat rate is the part I read with some envy, seventeen years late. In 2000 I was sixteen, on a 56k modem in Ankara, and there was no version of the Spanish arrangement available to me. Turkish access was a subscription plus a phone bill and the phone bill was the one that hurt. Spain got a monthly number that did not move. We got a meter.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it bought ~

EresMás grew by purchase rather than by building, which was the standard method in 2000 and is why so little of it survived under its own name. It bought Telépolis, one of the older Spanish community portals, and it bought El Rincón del Vago, the homework and study-notes site that generations of Spanish students used to avoid reading the book.

El Rincón del Vago is still trading in 2026. Telépolis is a mail domain that died on the same September morning as its owner. Buying an audience does not transfer whatever made the audience show up, and both of those outcomes were decided by things that had nothing to do with eresMás.

~ sold twice ~

In October 2002 Retevisión merged into Grupo Auna, and in 2003 Auna sold the whole of eresMás to Wanadoo, France Telecom's internet arm, for 255 million euros paid in shares. The stated reason was Terra: France Telecom wanted a Spanish property big enough to fight the Telefónica portal on its own ground.

What actually happened is that the brand stopped existing. Wanadoo España absorbed it, Amena and Wanadoo were pulled together under the same owner in 2005, and on 1 June 2006 the Wanadoo name itself was retired worldwide in favor of Orange. Three years after launch eresMás had won its market. Six years after launch there was nothing left of it above the mail server.

~ the twenty-year tail ~

Mail is the thing that never dies on schedule. Long after the portal, the dial-up business and the brand had gone, eresmas.com and eresmas.net kept delivering, because the accounts were tied to people who had signed up in 2000 and never changed anything. Orange inherited them, then MasOrange inherited them from the 2024 merger, and the cost of running them sat quietly on somebody's ledger for two decades.

On 17 July 2025 the notice went out. On 5 September 2025 thirteen domains went dark on the same day: orange.es and amena.com and ctv.es and ya.com and wanadoo.es and jet.es and mixmail.com and jazzfree.com and telepolis.com, along with eresmas.com and eresmas.net. That list is a map of the entire first generation of the Spanish internet, and it was retired with one press release.

There was no way to keep the address. MasOrange owns the domains, so nobody could point their old mail at another provider. Whatever was in there on 4 September was the last of it.

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