mail2web.com

» see mail2web.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

mail2web did one thing and it did it without asking you for anything. You loaded the page, you typed your email address and your mail password into two boxes, and it logged into your POP3 server on your behalf and showed you your inbox. No registration, and nothing to download. SoftCom Technology Consulting, a private company in Toronto, put it online in 1997 and it was conceived and built by Tony Yustein, the company's first CEO and one of its cofounders.

What made it work was that in 1997 almost everybody's mail lived on a POP3 server somewhere, and almost nobody's mail client lived anywhere except one desktop machine at home or at work. Your account was portable in theory and immobile in practice. mail2web was the bridge, and its own homepage claimed over sixteen million users a month across more than two hundred countries, which is the kind of number a company puts on its own front page and nobody ever audits.

The business around the free page grew heavier over the years. There was hosted Microsoft Exchange with BlackBerry support, a web chat gateway that spoke to MSN and ICQ, and for a while in the mid-2000s the company was even title sponsor of a Canadian motor race. The free lookup page stayed at the top of the site through every one of those pivots.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the machine that was not yours ~

Turkish internet cafes between 2002 and 2005 were the exact conditions mail2web was built for, even though nobody in them had heard the company's name. You paid by the hour for a Windows box that fifty other people used that week. Installing a mail client was out of the question, and half the time you did not have permission to anyway. Webmail solved this if your mail was already webmail, and a huge amount of mail in that era was not: it was a POP3 box from your ISP, with an address ending in the ISP's domain, reachable only from software.

So the question "how do I read my TTNet mail from here" had one honest answer that did not involve setting anything up, and that answer was a page like this one. The trade was obvious and everybody made it anyway: you were handing your mail password to a website over plain HTTP, on a computer fifty strangers had touched that week. It worked, which is most of why people kept doing it.

~ who ended up owning it ~

Ingram Micro bought SoftCom on 12 September 2013, picking up myhosting.com and mail2web.com in the same deal. Turker Sokullu, the cofounder who had run the company since 1997, went over to Ingram as an executive director. SoftCom kept its autonomy on paper and the brands kept running.

Then Hostway bought MyHosting.com back out of Ingram Micro, and mail2web came along as part of the furniture. By that point the free lookup page was a curiosity bolted to the front of a hosting business, and the hosting business was the only part anybody was buying.

~ the day it died ~

The Internet Archive has mail2web.com answering with its own homepage, login boxes and all, on 27 May 2024. There is a gap of nearly two months after that, and from 23 July 2024 onward every single capture is a 301 redirect to hostway.com/myhosting/, a page headed "MyHosting is Now Hostway." It carries no date and no mention of mail2web at all.

The free Exchange tier had gone the same way fifteen years earlier, quietly, by email: users on a phone forum in April 2009 compared notes about a message saying the free hosted Exchange would end that May. Nothing about this service ever got an announcement. It just stopped answering.

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