Excite Mail (Japan)

» see email.excite.co.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Excite is a dead American search portal, buried elsewhere on this site. Excite Japan began in August 1997 as that portal's Tokyo subsidiary and ended up an Itochu company once the American side collapsed. It kept the name through all of it and is still serving pages at excite.co.jp today, a quarter of a century after the original went under. This is the obituary of the mailbox it gave away for fourteen years: a Japanese product with an American word on the front of it, not to be confused with the @excite.com accounts IAC switched off in 2021.

The free mail opened in April 2004 at email.excite.co.jp, though the company had been offering a free mailbox to anyone who signed up for its dial-up service as far back as the autumn of 2000. One gigabyte, later two after a campaign in March 2014 that simply doubled everyone. Stay away for 120 days and the mailbox was deleted, a rule that had been 60 days when the storage was smaller.

New registrations stopped on 21 December 2017. The announcement came on the service's own blog at noon on 15 May 2018, and the reason given there is one sentence: there was no longer a prospect of providing the service stably on a continuing basis. Speaking to the Japanese trade press the same week, the company put it in plainer business terms, that it had weighed the scale of the service against its usage and its profitability and concluded free was not sustainable, and that the media side of the business would be concentrating on a news site aimed at young women instead.

~ the case file ~

~ two years with the search off ~

On 28 October 2016 the search function inside the mailbox stopped working. Excite's line on it was that there was no prospect of restarting, and that remained the position for the rest of the product's life. A free mailbox with two gigabytes in it and no way to search them is a filing cabinet with the drawers welded shut, and it stayed in that state for almost two years before anybody closed it.

There was one other episode nobody at the company ever tied to anything. Across a fortnight from late October 2017 the blog carried four posts about a wave of unauthorized logins: a warning, a report that the wave had subsided, a request that everyone re-check their settings, then a recovery notice. New signups closed six weeks after that. No document from the company links the two events.

~ the export button ~

The tool for saving your own mail opened at 11am on 28 June 2018, not quite three months ahead of the end. It came with an instruction that is worth reading twice: the moment you clicked export, your mailbox would stop sending and receiving. You could keep your mail or keep using the address, and the same button decided which.

Send and receive died for everybody at 3pm on 18 September. Reading and downloading carried on another ten days and stopped at the same hour on the 28th, and the blog's final post went up at that exact minute to say so. Everything still in the system was then deleted.

~ what moved in on the same day ~

On 18 September 2018, the day the free mail died, Excite began a new free mail service on the same excite.co.jp domain. You could have it if you were a subscriber to the company's fiber service over NTT docomo's lines, and if you had been an Excite Mail user on the closing day or had run the export at some point that summer. One address, no extras. One gigabyte, which is exactly half what the dead service had been giving away to anyone who asked.

Excite's help center is blunt about the relationship, because it has to be: these are separate services and you cannot keep your old address. What the replacement hands you is your BB.excite member ID at excite.co.jp, and that one is not changeable either. It is running today, its help pages edited this month. The domain, in other words, never stopped carrying free mail. It stopped carrying it for the public, and the host the public used, email.excite.co.jp, no longer resolves at all.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »