Nokia Mail

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

~ the last words ~

i owned nokia phones through the 2000s and had a used n95 later on. still. i never once used nokia mail on any of them. by 2008, when the service launched under its "nokia email" name, my primary address had been on hotmail for six years. nokia was the device brand for me. the email lived somewhere else.

the service history is messier than the name suggests. still. it started as ovi mail beta on 13 august '08, part of nokia's push to build its own web-services stack alongside ovi store and ovi files. by 2011 nokia had migrated the ovi mail accounts over to yahoo's infrastructure and rebranded the whole thing "nokia mail," a yahoo-powered webmail service wearing a nokia address. at that migration point, ovi mail had over 9 million active accounts.

the shutdown belonged to microsoft. microsoft bought nokia's devices and services business in april 2014, and by march 2015 the nokia mail and nokia chat brands were being wound down. on 9 march '15 users lost sign-in access. user data was destroyed within six months. microsoft pointed departing users at outlook.com and skype.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

ovi mail was designed for the S40 and symbian phones nokia sold in emerging markets by the tens of millions. back then. the target user was someone whose first email address would be created on a phone, not a desktop. their phone would be the primary access device. nokia partnered with yahoo in 2011 to hand off the underlying infrastructure while keeping the branded address. this let nokia focus on the client software while yahoo ran the servers (or whatever it was called).

~ the microsoft ending ~

microsoft's acquisition of nokia's device business in april 2014 folded the whole services stack into a company that already had outlook.com. the redundancy was obvious. by early 2015 the closure notices went out and the 9 march deadline cut off new sign-ins. users could still access old messages briefly through migration windows, but nothing was permanent. the data was gone six months later.

this was one of a dozen nokia-branded services microsoft killed in 2014 and 2015. the mixradio spinoff had gone independent in december '14, and the "here" maps division was sold that same year. nokia mail was smaller than either of those, and the shutdown got no press outside the nokia enthusiast blogs.

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