goo Mail

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

~ the obituary ~

goo Mail and my first modem are the same age. In 1998 I got online at home in Turkey over a 14.4k line, and the same year NTT put a free mailbox on its goo portal in Japan. Two people at either end of the continent joined the same decade and never once touched each other's internet. The Japanese web of that era was as large and as populated as the American one and almost none of it crossed the language boundary in either direction, which is why a service that ran for twenty-eight years and finished second in its national market is a name nobody outside Japan will recognize.

That is worth stating plainly instead of pretending to a memory I do not have. I never held a goo address. What makes this grave interesting from the outside is the shape of the ending, because goo Mail did not die of competition in any dramatic way. It died of a slow removal carried out over twelve years by the company that owned it, one tier at a time, with plenty of notice at every step.

The peak is documented. In 2008, webmail usage surveys in Japan put goo Mail second, behind Yahoo Mail, which in Japan meant behind the largest portal in the country rather than behind a global brand. The free tier gave you two gigabytes and up to a hundred thousand messages. The paid tier, goo Mail Advance, gave you five gigabytes and let you use it over SMTP and POP with a real client instead of a browser.

~ the case file ~

~ the portal years ~

The redesign landed on 31 March 2010, shipped alongside a partnership that put goo's mail engine behind NTT Docomo's own web mail for phone customers. It went badly in the most specific way software can go badly. Contemporary reports describe it as extremely slow, and describe messages opening that were not the message you had clicked.

Mail makes exactly one promise, which is that the thing in front of you is the thing addressed to you. Break that and no amount of storage matters. On 31 May 2010 they released a Simple Mode, which was the old lightweight behavior offered as a way around the new interface. By 2011 the free tier had been consolidated into Simple Mode and nothing else. The escape hatch had quietly become the product, and the redesign it was meant to escape was now the paid one.

~ the long slow exit ~

On 1 October 2013 the free version stopped taking new registrations, and on 10 March 2014 it ended entirely. Anyone still there had to pay or leave, and free webmail by 2014 meant Gmail, so most of them left. What survived for the next twelve years was a subscription mailbox held by people whose address had been printed on things, given to banks, used to register accounts they could no longer remember the names of.

NTT announced the end on 22 April 2025, stopped new sign-ups that August, billed through January 2026 and switched it off at one in the afternoon on 25 February. goo blog had already gone the previous November and the portal itself is being taken apart around it. Twenty-eight years of one country's ordinary correspondence, closed on schedule with a help-page article and an export deadline. Nobody wrote about it in English. There was nothing to say that the notice had not already said.

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