ICQmail

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

~ the goodbye ~

Every big messenger of the late nineties eventually decided it should also be your email provider. ICQ's version was ICQmail: free webmail, a small storage quota, ads down the side, an address at icqmail.com that matched the identity you already had in the messenger. The earliest trace of it in the Internet Archive is an email section on icq.com from May 1999, and the service itself never published a launch date, which tells you roughly how much ceremony the thing got.

What it got instead, eventually, was a decent feature set. A calendar. Free POP3 and free IMAP4 access, which in the early 2000s was something Hotmail and Yahoo were still charging for. Under the hood it ran on AOL's mail platform after AOL bought ICQ, so the plumbing was the same plumbing as AOL Mail with an ICQ coat of paint.

Turkey is a market where ICQ was the messenger and only ever the messenger. People here had the client and a UIN, and their email was Hotmail or Yahoo or later a Mynet address. The mail half of ICQ was an American and then a Russian product decision that simply never arrived as a habit.

~ the chronicle ~

~ fourteen years with the door shut ~

In April 2010 AOL sold ICQ to Digital Sky Technologies, which became Mail.ru Group and later VK. The ability to register a new ICQmail account was removed around that sale and never came back. Existing mailboxes carried on.

That left a strange object sitting on the internet for the next decade and a half: a live webmail service with a fixed, permanently shrinking membership, operated by a Russian company on an American company's mail platform, for an address space nobody new could ever enter. It did not get discontinued, it got sealed.

~ july 2014 ~

At some point in July 2014 the service was moved off the AOL platform and onto Mail.ru's own. Users were not notified. People logged in to find mail missing, with no restore path offered and no announcement to point at. This is the worst thing in ICQmail's record and the hardest part of its history to source, because the migration was never written up by the company that performed it. The only durable account of it is community reports and the ArchiveTeam page.

~ the last day ~

In May 2024 ICQ announced that everything would stop on 26 June 2024, twenty-eight years after Mirabilis shipped the first client. ICQmail was named in that notice and went with it. The suggested destinations were VK Messenger and VK WorkSpace, neither of which is a mail service, so the answer to "where do my messages go" was that they do not go anywhere.

The messenger got obituaries in a dozen languages that week. The mailbox attached to it got a line in the footer of the shutdown page.

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