Lovemail

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

~ the eulogy ~

In December 1998 lovemail.com was under construction and the plan was postcards. "This site will strive to be one of the best FREE online Post Card centers, where you will be able to send cards to that special person", with a promise that all the cards and poems would be written especially for the site. There was a link to a test version for anyone who wanted to see how it was coming along.

A year later the plan was the one everybody had. "Get Your Free Email at Lovemail! FREE Web-based Email for everyone!", copyright NetCards, Inc., with a link for webmasters to earn cash and a car giveaway running down the side. The domain was the product. If you wanted a free address in 1999 you could take one at Hotmail, or you could take one that said something.

Underneath, it was the standard portal bundle of the period, and the site's own description names the contents: free web-based globally accessible email "with fun features such as chat, trivia quizzes, video games, electronic postcards and jokes". The games were Perl scripts sitting in cgi-bin with names like asteroids, breakout, lander and solitaire. The personals section ran on licensed software from a company called Soulmates Technology. The navigation bar across the top put Email first and Online dating second.

My own free address in those years was the one everybody in Turkey had, which was Hotmail, and later a Turkish portal account. A domain like this was never going to travel, because the joke only works in English and the people it was aimed at were Americans sending Valentine's cards. What I like about it is that the postcards stayed running underneath the mail for years after the mail had become the point.

~ the dossier ~

~ the last login ~

The mail itself lived at webmail.lovemail.com, which is how a small operator ran a mail service then: license the webmail software, point a subdomain at it, leave the marketing site where it is. From March 2003 the root of lovemail.com stopped being a homepage at all and became a 398-byte file containing nothing but a meta refresh into that subdomain, which is a sign of a service still running rather than one that has stopped.

The login page there answered normally on 29 July 2003. By 30 October 2003 the same address was returning a redirect to a member login at luxsci.com, an email host with no visible connection to the brand, and it never came back. That is the death, inside a three-month bracket with no announcement anywhere in it, which is the usual shape for a service with no press officer.

~ what the front page said next ~

The notice, when it came, is one line in the middle of a page about something else. By 2004 lovemail.com was a Java chat applet with the text around it reading: "Note: Lovemail email service has been discontinued. Only Chat Rooms are now in operation." Under that, the house rules: the chat is for adults, nobody under thirteen, and violators of the no-cursing policy may be banned without notice.

The chat went on by itself for a while. A banner in August 2004 reads "THE MOMENT YOU HAVE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR HAS FINALLY COME LOVEMAIL IS BACK", in capitals, pointing everyone at lovemailchat.com. A year later the same page had calmed down to "Lovemail Chat is alive on another domain name". Neither domain answers today and the copyright line never moved off 2003.

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