İlkposta

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

~ the obit ~

İlkposta started in 2001 as a research and development project in Istanbul and turned into one of the few free webmail services that was Turkish the whole way down. Not a Turkish skin over an American product, but an inbox where the interface and the help text and the mail that answered your support request were all written by people in the same city. It ran on Open WebMail, a Perl package the operators chose because it was simple enough to keep alive with a small team.

The offer was five gigabytes per account at a time when that number still meant something, plus a calendar and a greylisting setup the site talked about more than it talked about storage. In January 2008 the magazine PCnet published a list of the ten best free Turkish-language mail services and put İlkposta on it alongside Gmail and Hotmail. That is roughly the high-water mark anybody bothered to write down.

On 8 April 2019 the service posted a notice to a Blogger page it had been using since 2009. The e-mail and calendar services offered since 2001 were being wound down for reasons the company called legal and economic. Sending and receiving would stop on 15 May 2019, and on 15 June 2019 every account would be deleted. Eleven people left comments.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what the notice said ~

The Turkish is plain and unhurried. "2001 yılından bu yana tarafınıza vermekte olduğumuz e-posta ve takvim hizmetlerini, gerek hukuki gerekse de ekonomik gerekçelerle kademeli olarak sonlandırma kararı almış bulunmaktayız." Since 2001 we have been providing you with e-mail and calendar services, and we have decided to wind them down gradually, for legal as well as economic reasons. Then the two dates, then a thank-you for the interest shown to date.

"Hukuki gerekçeler" is doing quiet work in that sentence. Turkey's data retention and lawful-access obligations for hosting providers got heavier through the 2010s, and running a free mailbox service for strangers stopped being a thing a small Istanbul operation could do as a side project. The notice never spells it out. It did not need to.

~ why a Turkish inbox was a hard sell ~

I was in Turkey for all eighteen of İlkposta's years and I was never a customer, and the reason is not that I did not know it existed. MSN Messenger owned Turkish chat from about 2002 to 2010, and MSN wanted a Passport address, which in practice meant a Hotmail address. So everybody's default mailbox was already assigned before they ever went looking for one. A Turkish-language inbox with better spam handling was competing against a foreign one that your entire contact list was keyed to.

That left İlkposta with the users who came for the language rather than the network, mostly small businesses and people who wanted the reset-password mail to arrive in a sentence they could read without guessing. It is a real audience, and it is not an audience that grows.

~ what is left ~

The Wayback Machine has a working capture of the login page from 2 September 2019, three and a half months after mail stopped, still titled "ilkposta : Ücretsiz E-posta." By late 2021 the domain was a Dan.com for-sale page. Today ilkposta.com bounces to a parking lander and the registration is a fresh one from February 2022, so the original name went through at least one resale. The green hummingbird over the lowercase wordmark survived only because somebody archived an SVG in October 2017, and the Blogger page is still standing with its eleven comments on it.

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