MyOwnEmail

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

~ the eulogy ~

My first email address came from whatever everyone else was using, which in Turkey in 1998 meant Hotmail or whatever your dial-up provider handed you with the account. The inbox was the commodity and nobody thought about it. MyOwnEmail was in business over the other part, the bit before the at sign, and it had worked out that people cared about that far more than they cared about storage quotas.

By December 1997 the site was already advertising free web-based and forwarding accounts across more than two hundred domain names. It was built in Microsoft FrontPage 2.0, it ran on ColdFusion, and it had a mascot: a little character introduced on the home page with the line "Hi, I'm M.O.E.!" Around the sign-up form it had bolted the rest of a 1997 portal, chat and search and personals and news and weather, all of it crammed into a left-hand column of button GIFs. It grew by swallowing older services, Star Mail and PC Postal among them.

The appeal was that you could be reachable at an address that said something. One of the users who wrote in after it died had been on death-star.com for years. That was the offer in full: pick the domain that fits you, keep the mail, pay nothing, look at the banner ads. For most of eight years that held.

~ the dossier ~

~ the spam that came with it ~

Handing out free forwarding addresses on two hundred domains is also a description of a spam platform, and the record shows it was used as one. Steve Baldwin, writing it up the month it went, noted that there was considerable evidence of MyOwnEmail's services being repeatedly abused by spammers and guessed that it had hurt the business badly. Nobody ever published a cause of death, so that guess stands as the best one available. A service whose entire value is that you can mint an identity in thirty seconds is a service with no way to tell its good users from its bad ones.

~ the eleven day gap ~

The ending is unusually well dated for a site that nobody announced. The archive was crawling myownemail.com every single day, and every one of those crawls returned the same redirect into the ColdFusion login at /moe4/login/default.cfm. The last one is 28 June 2005 at twenty past eight in the morning. Then eleven days of nothing, and on 10 July the same URL returns a frameset pointing at a Dotster parking page, with an empty title tag and a fallback body that reads "Future Home." The whole thing is 574 bytes.

The login path itself took longer to admit it. On 7 August it was still answering, with three hundred and eighteen bytes saying the page you are looking for is down and to check back later. It said that into September. By late October it was a 404. The reader who tipped off Baldwin had noticed in the last week of July, which was already a month after the server stopped, and said what everybody in that position says: there had been no warning at all.

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