Gawab

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

~ the goodbye ~

Gawab was built for people who read Arabic, and I do not. That is the whole of the distance. In Turkey the free webmail habit went to Hotmail first and Yahoo after that, and an inbox designed right to left was solving a problem I never had.

The name is a phonetic spelling of the Arabic word for a letter. The service started in 1999 out of Alexandria in Egypt, and it did the thing that sounds trivial until somebody asks you to do it: a mail client that worked properly in both directions, in a browser, at the connection speeds the region actually had rather than the ones the demo assumed.

It was also further ahead technically than you would guess from where it was built. Gawab ran a single-page webmail interface on what the industry later started calling Ajax, early enough for that to be unusual anywhere. Free accounts came with POP3 and IMAP at a point when Hotmail was charging for both, and the same stack was sold on to Arabic-language portals as outsourced mail infrastructure.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it went quiet ~

There is no shutdown notice to quote here because there was never one written. The Internet Archive has working captures of gawab.com through the middle of 2013 and nothing usable after that. On the mail-nerd forums people start posting that the site is unreachable in May 2013, and they are still asking where it went in March 2014, with no answer from anybody at the company in between.

That is how most of the regional web ends. A company stops being able to pay for something, the support address stops answering, and the domain sits there for a few more years until the registration lapses. The version with a farewell blog post and a data export tool is the exception, not the rule, and it mostly happens to companies large enough to have a communications department.

~ what replaced it ~

Everyone holding a gawab.com address lost it, and there were enough of them that the domain still turns up in the contact field of old company websites across the region, pointing at a mailbox that has not accepted anything in over a decade. Nobody built a direct replacement. By 2013 the answer to Arabic webmail was the same as the answer everywhere else, which was Gmail.

The earlier part is what deserves keeping. For most of the 2000s a small Egyptian company ran mail infrastructure that a serious slice of the Arabic-reading internet depended on daily, and it did that with a client ahead of what the American incumbents were shipping at the time. Leaving no announcement is not the same as leaving nothing.

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