inter7

» see inter7.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Some time between 1 and 7 December 2014 a box appeared on the front page of inter7.jp under the heading used in Japan for a service ending. It said that at noon on Saturday 20 December all services would stop completely and the site would close. Then it said that being able to provide the service for twelve long years had been the gift of its users' patronage, and a miracle.

What was closing was a free mailbox. Web mail in the browser, POP and IMAP for anyone who preferred a desktop client, forwarding, a spam filter, 250 megabytes you could extend a little further every day. It would also reach into the inbox your internet provider had given you and pull that mail across, which in Japan in the early 2000s was close to the most useful thing a free mail service could do for you, because the provider inbox was the one everybody already had and nobody could read from anywhere else.

For a free service it was unusually complete underneath. The setup manuals walk you through Becky and Outlook Express with screenshots, and in those screenshots both server boxes read mail.inter7.jp, incoming over IMAP4rev1 with CRAM-MD5 sitting there as an authentication option. In 2005 a free mailbox in most countries was a web page and, if you were fortunate, a POP server. This one assumed you owned a mail client and had opinions about which protocol it spoke. The sample account in the screenshot is named Fullmail Tarou, after the word the service put on its own circulars.

~ the record ~

~ what paid for it ~

The money came from advertising, on a rate card that explicitly allowed adult sites to buy space, and from a numbered mailshot that went out to every account on the system. The information page logs them going out in sequence through 2005: Mail-21 on 7 June, Mail-22 on 22 June, Mail-23 on 12 July. That was the deal, stated without embarrassment. You got the mailbox, the service got to write to you.

Around the mail there was a small strange suburb of a site: an RSS reader, a memo pad, a calendar, a board where people posted pictures in a chain the way the Japanese word game works, another board for finding mail friends. I never had an inter7 address, but I had its structural cousins over the same years, and the shape is identical everywhere. A free mailbox wants to be a portal and grows the parts a portal has, and nobody ever touches them.

~ the incident log ~

The thing that makes this service worth a grave is its information page, which is a list of the times it failed, written plainly and left up for a decade. A backup schedule was set wrong on 1 December 2004 and roughly fifty thousand messages were delayed. The upstream provider's line went down on 4 July 2005 and took the service with it for three hours. In August a configuration error stopped two of its domains receiving for eleven days.

And then the entry from 31 October 2005, which I have read several times to be sure of it. A system failure destroyed the most recent data belonging to about twelve percent of users, and the lost data was restored from the backup of 24 October. One account in eight lost a week. The notice gives the percentage, gives the restore date, apologizes, and links to a fuller report. Paid services have buried worse than that behind the word "degradation".

~ two running numbers ~

Every page carried two running numbers, the hits for today against yesterday and the total number of users, and because they were on the page the Internet Archive captured them by accident for years. So the last stretch of this service is visible in a way almost nothing else from its size and era is. 102,855 users in February 2014. 117,175 at the start of July. 115,999 in October.

Then 98,726 on 18 November, which is seventeen thousand accounts gone in six weeks with no notice yet published. 89,961 on 1 December, still no notice. 86,682 on 7 December with the farewell box now sitting above it, and 79,818 on the 19th, the day before noon came. Whatever was happening to that number had begun well before anybody was told, and the operator never said a word about either thing. It never said who it was, either. Twelve years and a hundred thousand mailboxes, and the only name anywhere on the site was the one in the copyright line.

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