freemail

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

~ the last words ~

Signing up meant picking a server first. The front page put the whole list in a dropdown and told you to choose one and click Go, and the thing you were choosing was the middle of your own email address. Some of them were plants and groceries: plum, lily, cocoa, vanilla, catnip, basil. The rest were stars, which is a decision somebody made on purpose. Mizar, Deneb, Capella, Spica. There was also a host called mutt, presumably for whoever got the joke.

The rules were set out in a members' agreement that reads today like a receipt for a bargain nobody now would take. Article four, clause two: the mailbox holds three megabytes. Anything that arrives once it is full gets refused, and so does any single message larger than the box itself. Article four, clause one, directly above it: users of the freemail servers will be delivered roughly three to four pieces of direct mail per day. Not shown advertising around the mailbox. Sent advertising into it, as mail, counting against the three megabytes.

That was the deal in 1999 and people took it everywhere, including where I was sitting. A free mailbox was among the first things you collected once the connection worked, and nobody read the terms on any of them. What sorted you into one service rather than another was mostly which sign-up form you could actually complete, and this one asked for a Japanese address with a Japanese phone line behind it. I spent years inside this category without ever being eligible for this particular example of it.

~ the record ~

~ what happened upstairs ~

The mail outlived the company. Heisei Denden, a Japanese telecoms operator, went to the Tokyo District Court on 3 October 2005 to start civil rehabilitation proceedings with liabilities reported at around 120 billion yen. A sponsor was found that December and walked away on 16 April 2006, at which point rehabilitation was abandoned and the president said he would resign and file for personal bankruptcy himself.

What was still worth money got sold. The telephone business, including the direct-line and ADSL products, was transferred on 16 June 2006 to Japan Telecom, which was renamed SoftBank Telecom a few months later. freemail came across in that bundle, which is how a free mail service from 1999 came to be disposed of inside the estate of a failed telephone company.

~ the notice ~

On 27 October 2006 the new owner posted the ending. The wording is almost entirely about itself: SoftBank Telecom had received the transfer of telecommunications business from Heisei Denden dated 16 June 2006, had decided to consolidate services, and would therefore end the free mail service freemail on 31 January 2007. Underneath, a line in smaller text notes that after the service ends your freemail address cannot be used.

An actual reason appears here, which hardly ever happens, and the reason is housekeeping. Nobody claims the service failed or lost its users. It was absorbed, counted, and closed as part of tidying up what had been bought.

~ the half that went first ~

There was a second tier called freemail plus, which was free dial-up with the mailbox attached, and it was killed on the same logic two months earlier. It ended on 30 November 2006, and the access points you dialed to reach it were switched off the same day. That date had already been set at the bottom of the October notice, in a line under the main announcement. What went up on 1 December was the confirmation, written the day after in the past tense.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »