MyRealBox

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

~ the goodbye ~

Novell sold a mail server called NetMail. Enterprise software, sold to organizations, tested in the ways enterprise software is usually tested, which is to say against synthetic load in a lab. The NetMail engineering team wanted something harder than that, so they pointed a public free email service at the same codebase and ran candidate builds on it before those builds went out to paying customers. The service was myrealbox.com, and the people using it were the load.

The domain was registered on 7 September 1999 and the Internet Archive's first capture of it is 28 November that year. What it offered was unremarkable on paper and unusual in practice. It was free and carried no advertising, and it gave you real IMAP and POP access in a period when Hotmail and Yahoo were both working out how to charge for exactly that. Technical people found it, told each other about it, and stayed for a decade.

The hunt for a free mailbox that would do POP without charging for it was universal in those years, and I did my share of it in Turkey on a Superonline line. MyRealBox traveled through a narrower channel than that: English-language mailing lists and administrator forums, where knowing that a Novell server product had a public test rig with free accounts on it counted as useful information. Nothing about it ever reached a Turkish forum I was reading.

~ the chronicle ~

~ a test rig with users ~

Running a demo as a live public service is a stranger decision than it sounds. Every new build carried the risk of losing somebody's mail, and the people it would have been lost from had not paid anything and could not complain to an account manager. Novell got a workload it could not have written itself: real spam, real attachment sizes, real IMAP clients behaving badly, real people leaving forty thousand messages in an inbox to see what happened.

In exchange the users got a mail service run by the engineers who wrote the server rather than by a marketing department deciding what the free tier was allowed to include. That trade held for about seven years.

~ sold with the source code ~

In September 2006 MyRealBox stopped accepting new accounts, which is the first clear sign that Novell was done with it. In late February 2007 Novell sold the NetMail source code and the brand to Messaging Architects, a Montreal company, and the MyRealBox service went with the deal. Messaging Architects promised to keep the free service running, and did.

They also carried on using it the way Novell had. NetMail became M+NetMail under the new owner, and MyRealBox stayed on the front of it as the public showcase for the engine. Archived captures from 2010 still show the Messaging Architects wordmark and an advertisement for their M+ Guardian filtering product sitting in the frame around a mailbox that had by then been free for eleven years.

~ the first of June ~

Messaging Architects discontinued MyRealBox.com on 1 June 2011. The long-running Free Email R.I.P. list at emailaddresses.com, which has tracked free mailbox closures since the nineties, records it in one line with the date and nothing else.

The domain resolves today and immediately throws you at a parked lander. The logo is still recoverable from the archive: lowercase gray letters reading myrealbox, a small .com underneath, an opened envelope beside it. The file still carries the Inkscape tag of whoever drew it, which means somebody at a mail company sat down and made a proper wordmark for the thing they were only supposed to be testing with.

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