MCI Mail
» see mcimail.com as it lived, on the wayback machine
~ the obituary ~
mci mail launched on september 23, 1983 in washington dc. the parent company was mci communications, the long-distance carrier that had spent the 1970s suing att for the right to exist. william g. mcgowan, mci's chairman, wanted a second revenue stream that did not depend on minutes-of-use pricing. email was the bet.
the service unbundled a 1985 corporate mailroom into a single subscription. you could send a digital message to another mci mail account, or a paper letter that mci would print on a laser printer in a city near the recipient and drop into the postal system the next morning. fax and telex were available on the same login. for a business that previously ran four separate vendor contracts, the convenience was real.
in 1989 mci mail became the first commercial email service to interconnect with the internet. vint cerf had joined as vice president of digital information services in 1982, left in 1986, then came back in 1994 and stayed until the service died. the gateway was his project.
i was nine years old when mci mail did its internet handshake. by the time i had my own dial-up account at home in turkey, mci mail had already been outflanked by hotmail and by yahoo, and was a service for shrinking corporate clients in the united states. it never had a turkish footprint.
~ the case file ~
| Born | 23 September 1983, Washington DC |
|---|---|
| Peak | first commercial email service to interconnect with the internet, 1989 |
| Killed | 30 June 2003 at 11:59 pm ET |
| Lifespan | 19 years 9 months |
| Made by | MCI Communications |
| Killed by | free webmail and cheaper fax |
~ what really happened ~
two things ate mci mail in the late 1990s. free webmail showed corporate buyers that the per-message fee was a luxury, not a necessity. and fax machines got faster and cheaper and stopped needing a service bureau in the middle. mci mail's value proposition was unbundling a 1985 mailroom. by 2000 the mailroom was already a web browser.
mci itself had merged into worldcom in 1998 and was inside the worldcom accounting fraud collapse in 2002. the new owner needed to cut anything that did not earn its keep. mci mail did not. the service was shut down at 11:59 pm eastern on june 30, 2003.
~ what replaced it ~
the closing announcement asked customers to migrate to a free webmail provider. the irony was on purpose. the service that had cost real money per message in 1985, that had taken three days to print and mail a laser letter to des moines, was telling its last paying users to go sign up at hotmail.com.
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