livedoor Mail

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

~ the obit ~

On 1 July 2004, livedoor put a free gigabyte of mail storage in front of Japanese users and became the first service in the language to do it. Gmail's beta had been out since April that year, but it was invitation-only and had no Japanese version, so for several months the largest free mailbox a Japanese speaker could actually open was called livedoor ギガメーラー, livedoor Gigamailer. The gigabyte was also a little generous in its accounting, covering the mailbox and fifty megabytes of file storage together.

The product was four years old by then, and it had already outlived the company that built it. It launched on 4 August 2000 as livedoor Web Mail, when livedoor was a free dial-up ISP founded the previous August and the portal was a search box with a weather forecast bolted to it. That company filed for civil rehabilitation in October 2002, and Takafumi Horie's On the Edge bought the business and the name in November, which is how the mailbox came to belong to the firm that would spend the next decade being the most notorious internet company in Japan. The Gigamailer relaunch in 2004 turned it from a utility attached to an ISP into something people signed up for on purpose. Access was capped at the first ten thousand registrants drawn from paying blog and connection subscribers, and the cap came off on 4 August 2004, exactly four years after the original launch. Mobile access arrived thirteen days later, and translation inside the mail client on 2 September.

By July 2007 it had roughly two million accounts and had lost money every year it had existed. ITmedia reported the renewal that month under a headline quoting the company's own framing: the last push toward breaking even. What livedoor actually did was adopt Gmail as the engine, keep the livedoor logo bolted to the top left, and move everyone from an address at a livedoor subdomain to a plain @livedoor.com. The interface from that day onward was Gmail with the wordmark swapped.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the gigabyte race ~

The gigabyte was the whole pitch, and it kept being the pitch for years after the number stopped being remarkable. A paid tier called Gigamailer Plus launched on 23 February 2005 at 294 yen a month, and what you bought was two gigabytes instead of one and ten POP accounts instead of three. It also bought you an exemption from a rule worth sitting with: on the free tier, a mailbox left alone for sixty days could have its contents deleted. The upgrade path at a Japanese portal in 2005 was to pay three hundred yen a month so your own mail would not be thrown away for inattention.

Outside Japan the gigabyte race is remembered as a Gmail story, because Gmail is what won it. The Japanese leg of the same race was run by a portal that got there first in its own language and could not convert the lead into money. By the time the paid tier was retired in August 2007, the thing it had been selling was free from Google anyway.

~ wearing someone else's inbox ~

The six years after the Gmail switch are the strangest stretch of the product's life. livedoor Mail tracked Google's storage increases as they happened, which meant its advertised capacity trailed the thing it was running on by a rounding error. In January 2012, Gmail offered 7,666 megabytes and livedoor Mail offered 7,660. Six megabytes was the entire difference between a Japanese portal's flagship mail product and the American service inside it.

The seams showed elsewhere too. Gmail Labs was unavailable. Themes were unavailable. Log into the mobile version and the header did not say livedoor Mail, it said livedoor.com, because the string came from somewhere nobody at livedoor controlled. One genuine difference survived in the user's favor: unlike most free webmail of the era, and unlike its own earlier free tier, the account was not deleted for inactivity.

~ the day it died ~

The closure page went up at mail.livedoor.com/close.html on 26 March 2013, the same day new registrations stopped, and it ran a two-line schedule: 26 March 2013, signups closed; 31 October 2013, final day of service. Everything went, including the Calendar and the Talk features. After the final day, nothing could be sent to or from an @livedoor.com address at all.

The page also linked a guide to moving your mail out, and the destination it documented was Gmail. Having spent six years as Gmail in a livedoor costume, the service's last act was to point its users at the undisguised version. At the bottom of that farewell page, under the migration instructions, a Japanese portal carried a legal notice on its own exit door: Gmail is a trademark or registered trademark of Google Inc.

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