iName

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

~ the eulogy ~

The free-email question had one answer where I was. Turkish portals and magazine cover discs through the late nineties all pointed at Hotmail, and almost nobody on a modem here went looking past it. iName was selling something else into a different market, and it is worth describing, because what it sold is the thing nobody sells anymore: an email address that was supposed to be yours permanently, at a domain that said something about you.

The company was formed in 1995 as Vanity Mail Services by Gerald Gorman, an investment banker, and Gary Millin, who was at Harvard Business School. They had accumulated more than twelve hundred domain names by speculating on them early, among them world.com and doctor.com. Registration renewals on twelve hundred domains cost real money every year, so they monetized the inventory the only way that made sense in 1996. They handed out email addresses on it.

The archived front page from January 1998 still carries the sell. It calls itself a complete email experience and tells you that you can read email on the web or forward messages anywhere you like. Then the line that mattered: wherever you go, anywhere in the world, you can be reached at your iName address. Pick your own name at engineer.com, or at any one of three hundred quality email names.

The business was never the mailbox. It was the domain portfolio, and the mailboxes were how you justified holding it. They proved the point in 1999 by selling kosher.com and london.com for two million dollars. That same year they renamed the whole company after the best domain they owned and took mail.com public in June.

~ the dossier ~

~ the domain hoard ~

Three hundred domains to choose from was a serious offer in 1997, and it is hard to explain now how serious. A free webmail account meant an address at somebody else's brand. iName let a doctor be at doctor.com and an engineer be at engineer.com, at no charge and with no end date, and the only thing it cost the company was a renewal fee it was already paying.

By 2000 that had produced 14.6 million accounts, mostly free, and a company that had never been profitable. Those two facts are the same fact. Every new signup was another mailbox to store and forward with no revenue attached, and the dot-com financing that made it survivable stopped being available in exactly the window when the account numbers peaked.

~ what a lifetime meant ~

In April 2001 the company sold its consumer email division and the mail.com domain to Net2Phone. What was left renamed itself EasyLink and went into business file transfer. The millions of free accounts changed owner in a corporate sale, which is a normal thing to happen and is also the moment a promise made by one set of people becomes an obligation held by another set who never made it.

Then came the notice. Users got a message whose wording survives in a forum thread from early 2002: unfortunately we are no longer able to offer this service to you free of charge, and on 12/01/2001 we made forwarding a premium pay service. The free-for-life campaign, which the same thread remembers being promoted very heavily six years earlier on exactly that basis, had lasted about five and a half years.

~ the forty-five days ~

The terms were $9.95 a year if you subscribed within forty-five days and $19.95 after that, and if you did neither, forwarding stopped and your mail stayed on the web where you had to go and fetch it. Forwarding was the product. An address you can be reached at anywhere in the world is a forwarding address by definition, so what went behind the paywall that December was the sentence on the 1998 front page. Today iname.com resolves to a parking lander, three lines of JavaScript that bounce you to an ad page.

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