FlashMail

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

~ the last words ~

Free webmail was the first thing I ever signed up for on the internet. Dial-up at home in Turkey, 1998 or 1999, and the appeal was not the mail. It was that an address which did not belong to your ISP meant you could leave your ISP without losing your name, which mattered a great deal when you were switching between whichever provider was cheapest that year. I had the big ones. FlashMail was not among them, and the strange part of writing this is that it outlived nearly every name I did have.

The earliest surviving copy of flashmail.com is from 5 December 1998, and it is almost nothing: a login box, a logo in dripping red horror-movie lettering, and a link to set up a new account. The form posts to /cwmail/cwmail.exe and the signup page is a ColdFusion script, which places it precisely in its year. Who built it is not recorded anywhere I could find, and the site never carried a company name in its footer across eleven years of captures. It was one of the dozens of free mail providers that appeared in 1997 and 1998 after Hotmail proved the model, and almost all of its cohort were gone inside five years.

By January 2001 it had grown into the standard shape for the category, which was a portal that happened to contain a mailbox. The login box was still there, but around it now sat a LookSmart search field, a column of directory categories running from Entertainment down to Travel, headlines, weather, stock quotes and a free stuff section. Nobody wanted a portal. Everybody building free email in 2001 built one anyway, because the mail itself did not pay for the servers.

~ the record ~

~ the middle years ~

The 2002 front page is a decent fossil of its moment. A "We Support America" graphic sits at the top, six months after September 11th. Down the side there is an offer to read your email by phone through a service called Webley, a shopping section, and a line selling nationwide internet access. A couple of years later the same page is pushing dial-up accounts at $8.95 and domain names at $7.95, which tells you what the business had become: not a mail service with ads, but a storefront with a mail service used as the bait.

Somewhere in there it also acquired the owner it would die under. PEAK Internet, a provider based in Corvallis, Oregon, selling connectivity to the mid-Willamette Valley, picked FlashMail up as part of a run of acquisitions. An Oregon ISP with a regional footprint was now running a free email brand with users scattered anywhere, which is the kind of mismatch that works until somebody does the arithmetic on it.

~ the home page that was a redirect ~

From September 2003 until the middle of 2006, flashmail.com served 371 bytes. The portal was gone and so was the logo. The entire document is a title that says FlashMail.com and a meta refresh pointed at http://209.40.64.199/scripts/webmail.exe, a raw IP address and a CGI binary.

For nearly three years the front door of a consumer email service was a bare redirect into the machine that actually held the mail. Everything that had been built around it was switched off and the mailbox was left running. The portal came back in late 2006, ad-funded and thinner, and stumbled on for another couple of years.

~ the day it died ~

In early 2009 PEAK Internet's president, Rick Petersen, sent the notice. "On April 13th, PEAK Internet will discontinue service for the free Flashmail e-mail system." Paying $24.00 a year would keep the address and add message management, an address book, calendaring and the ability to pull in other POP accounts. Everybody else had until 31 March to respond. "If you do not respond to this notice by March 31st, your Flashmail account and e-mail will be deleted on April 13th, 2009."

That is the whole ending. No collapse and no acquisition, just an ISP in Oregon doing a line-item review and deciding that eleven years of other people's correspondence was not worth the disk it sat on unless each person paid two dollars a month. The users on the email forums who noticed were mostly people who had kept a FlashMail address as a throwaway for a decade, and the thread about it is short. RocketMail had been swallowed by Yahoo back in 1997 and most of the rest of that 1998 cohort was gone by 2003. FlashMail outlasted nearly all of them and was then deleted on a Monday, by its landlord.

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