Listbox

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

~ the eulogy ~

Listbox did the unglamorous job of putting one email address in front of a group of people. You sent a message to the list and everyone on it received a copy. Replies came back to the same place. Fastmail's farewell post dates the service to 1996, putting its launch alongside eGroups and Topica, back when running a mailing list meant either operating a server yourself or paying somebody who already had one.

IC Group, a Philadelphia company that also ran the Pobox forwarding service, held it for the stretch before the sale. Fastmail acquired both products from IC Group in November 2015. By then Listbox had grown a second personality: alongside the discussion lists it sold newsletter sending, with a campaign composer and the option to write your message in Outlook and send it from there.

On 31 October 2018 Fastmail published a post titled "Sunsetting Listbox" and named the date. The service would stop on 1 March 2019. Group customers were pointed at Topicbox, Fastmail's newer product for team email. The newsletter customers got a different message: other services could better meet their needs, and Fastmail would help them move somewhere else.

~ the dossier ~

~ the discussion list problem ~

The two halves of Listbox were never really one product. A discussion list is a conversation with an archive, where the hard parts are threading and moderation. A newsletter is a broadcast, and its hard parts are deliverability and not getting mistaken for spam. Listbox had been quietly carrying both since the nineties because in 1996 nobody had split them into separate industries yet.

By 2018 they had been split for a decade. Mailchimp owned the broadcast side and Google Groups owned the free conversation side, so a service doing both at middling scale was squeezed from two directions at once. Fastmail's post is polite about this and the shape of the decision is still legible underneath: keep the part that fits a company selling email to teams, and let the other part go.

~ what fastmail kept ~

Topicbox inherited the idea rather than the code. One address reaches a whole group and the archive stays searchable. New people can read back through what was decided before they arrived. That last feature is the argument for group email over chat, and Listbox had been shipping it since before most of its 2018 customers owned an email address at all.

~ the signoff page ~

Listbox billed monthly, in dollars, to organizations that had decided a mailing list was worth a recurring line item. The version of this category I had access to carried no invoice at all: a Yahoo group, or a list running on hardware somebody's university already owned. The customers in a position to notice this one closing were the ones holding an invoice for it.

listbox.com still answers. It returns 796 bytes under the title "Listbox • Email Marketing". The heading reads "Listbox Email Marketing has signed off." Underneath sits a green button offering a free month of Topicbox, beside an image file named lb-tx.gif whose alt text is "Listbox has become Topicbox". The page has now been serving that sentence for longer than Fastmail gave customers to pack up.

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