nifmail.jp

» see nifmail.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Nifty sold dial-up and then broadband, and in June 2007 it started giving a mailbox away to people who had bought neither. The service was @nifty Mail, the free tier lived on its own domain at nifmail.jp, and the split was visible in the address itself. Paying connection customers got five gigabytes and an address at nifty.com. Everyone else got three gigabytes at nifmail.jp, free, with no stated expiry on the mail you kept there.

It was a 2007 product in the way that mattered: a browser inbox you could also reach from a keitai, built at a moment when Japanese portals were still competing on how many gigabytes they would hand a stranger. Nifty's FAQ did put one clock on it. Your address stayed valid for 120 days from your last login, which meant the mailbox was free but your attention was the rent.

On 18 February 2010 Nifty announced that nifmail.jp would close on 30 September. New registrations had already been stopped before the announcement went out. The stated reason was the balance between revenue and operating cost, read against market conditions, which is as close as a company gets to saying nobody was going to pay for this. Nifty did not publish how many people it was closing on, then or later.

~ the dossier ~

~ the inactivity clock ~

The same announcement carried a second date that is easy to miss. Anyone who had not logged in since before 18 November 2009 got the stop-service procedure applied to their account on 18 March 2010, more than six months before the service itself ended. Nifty emailed that group on 18 February and told them the way out: log in once before 18 March and you kept the mailbox until September like everybody else.

Count the gap and the cutoff stops looking arbitrary. From 18 November 2009 to 18 March 2010 is exactly 120 days, so the sweep was the FAQ rule being enforced rather than a new policy invented for the shutdown. That clock had been running on every dormant account the whole time, and the shutdown was simply the moment Nifty finally looked at it.

The shutdown therefore came in two waves, and the first was aimed at the people least likely to notice. Nifty gave them a month to log in, and told them so by email.

~ the way out of the mailbox ~

The instructions Nifty published for saving your mail are the most revealing part of the notice. Individually, you logged in, selected a message, right-clicked, and saved it as an eml file. One at a time. For anything larger than a handful, the notice said that POP server access had now been opened in connection with the shutdown announcement, so you could point a mail client at the account and pull the messages down.

That sentence says the quiet thing plainly. For three years the free tier had no POP, and the only way to reach your own mail was through Nifty's web client. The protocol that would let you take it somewhere else arrived attached to the announcement that the mail was going to be destroyed. Address books and blocked-sender lists exported as CSV, and a forwarding service ran until the final day.

~ what it cost to stay ~

What Nifty offered in place of a migration was a sales pitch. If you wanted to keep using @nifty Mail you signed up for the paid @nifty connection service, and your account moved from nifmail.jp to nifty.com. Three years of telling people where to reach you did not survive the move.

Nothing like this was ever on offer where I was. Turkish ISPs in that decade sold you a line and expected you to use Hotmail or Yahoo like everyone else, so the idea of an access provider running a consumer mail brand for non-customers reads as a specifically Japanese piece of portal competition. The arrangement underneath it does travel. nifmail.jp was an acquisition funnel that never acquired anybody, and when Nifty worked that out it deleted the funnel along with three years of other people's correspondence.

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