freeml

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

~ the goodbye ~

freeml launched in 1997 and let anyone create a mailing list for nothing. That was the whole proposition and it never really changed. You named a list, decided whether the world could join it or only people you invited, and from then on one message to one address reached everybody on it. GMO Media took it over and eventually renamed it freeml byGMO, which is the name most Japanese users would recognize.

Around the lists it built the things a list needs once a group actually uses it. Each list got a members-only area holding photos and a bulletin board, plus a shared schedule. There was a separate scheduling tool with a cartoon name, Totto Kettetaro, for picking a date everybody could make. None of this was advanced even in 2005. All of it was free, and for a school club or a neighborhood association or a band's fan group it was enough to never need anything else.

Scale is the surprising part. ITmedia reported 3.05 million registered users as of 2006, and GMO was still calling it the largest mailing-list service in Japan when it announced the closure thirteen years later. Western coverage of the shutdown barely exists. Japanese coverage was everywhere for a week, and the tone of it was closer to a school closing than a product being retired, which makes sense once you remember that for a lot of these users the list was the only group they belonged to online.

Turkey did this part with forums. By the time I had a connection worth having, every group conversation I was in lived on a phpBB board like donanimhaber or frmtr, under a signature block listing my hardware, and the only mailing lists in my life were work ones that arrived whether I asked or not. Japan held onto the format for two more decades. freeml closed thirteen days before Yahoo Groups deleted every file its users had uploaded, and a full year before Yahoo switched that service off for good.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the wind-down calendar ~

GMO Media announced the closure on 3 June 2019 and published a schedule with five dated steps, every one of them at noon. The same day as the announcement, administrators got a download tool that would package every message a list had ever carried, subjects and bodies included. On 16 July new list creation stopped and the smartphone apps went away, taking Totto Kettetaro with them. On 26 August you could no longer invite or add members. On 25 November the last archive request was accepted. On 2 December at noon, mail stopped moving and the site stopped loading.

Six months of warning with a working export tool is more than most shutdowns give anyone, and it is noticeably more than Yahoo gave Yahoo Groups the same year. The catch is in who the export was for: only a list's administrator could run it, only from a desktop computer, and an administrator who had lost interest or died or simply never read the notice took their list's whole archive down with them.

~ what did not get saved ~

Archive Team opened a project with a tracker and a grab script, then filed the result under lost. The project notes give two reasons, and neither is dramatic: the servers were slow to respond, and "heavy rate limiting and bans strongly limited the ability to archive any significant part of Freeml." What exists in the Internet Archive is one partial item collected in February 2020, months after the lights went out.

GMO was explicit about the rest. The notice states that posted text, images, and attachments held in its database would be deleted after the service ended and would not be reused. Twenty-two years of club minutes and argument threads, belonging to a few million people, deleted on schedule and legally, because deleting them was the responsible thing to do with other people's personal data. Both of those statements are true at the same time.

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