IncrediMail

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

~ the goodbye ~

incredimail was the email program you found installed on your aunt's computer. that is the honest place to put it. it belonged to the people who liked their mail with animated backgrounds and a little cartoon that flapped its wings when a message came in. i was a computer engineering student, i ran outlook express and then thunderbird and thought the whole thing was faintly embarrassing. i was also wrong about how long it would last.

it came out of tel aviv around 2000, made by a small israeli company literally called incredimail. the pitch was simple. take the plain gray inbox that outlook and the rest handed you and cover it in color and motion. the backgrounds moved and the emoticons were cartoons, and a little notifier did a dance when new mail arrived. none of it made email work better, and that was never the point. it made email feel like a toy, and a lot of people wanted exactly that.

the company grew big enough to go public and rename itself perion in 2011, though it kept the incredimail name on the mail client because people still knew it. by then i had long since moved to webmail like everyone else. you did not install a mail program anymore, you opened a browser tab. the animated inbox was a thing from a specific window of time, when email lived on your own machine and could be decorated.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the day it died ~

perion closed the incredimail servers on 20 march 2020, after almost exactly twenty years. the reason they gave was the obvious one, that messaging had moved to social apps and phones and the desktop mail client full of cartoons no longer had a place. users were told to export what they wanted and move on. twenty years is a long run for something everyone technical looked down on.

~ what it was really about ~

incredimail understood something the serious clients did not, that for a lot of people the computer was not a tool, it was a place to make things pretty. the same instinct that put animated glitter on myspace pages and a hundred smileys into an msn conversation lived in incredimail too. it was never for the engineers. it outlasted plenty of things the engineers built.

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