ONmail

» see onmail.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

In March 2000 I had a modem in a computer, which is where modems went. ONdigital's proposal was that the modem belonged in the television and the keyboard belonged in the remote control. That is ONmail, and its premise has to be explained before the obituary makes any sense at all: email, on a British digital terrestrial TV box, at 2400 bits per second.

It arrived on 7 March 2000 as an over-the-air update that added an ONmail section to the box's existing menus. The screens were drawn in purple where the rest of the ONdigital software was green, which told you that you had left the television behind and also made the text legible from a sofa. Addresses ended in @onmail.co.uk and the box could reach nothing else, so your ONmail account could only talk to the service it lived in. Attachments never worked either, partly because the interface had nowhere to put them and partly because that modem needed most of an evening for anything larger than a sentence.

Then ONdigital tried to sell real internet access, and ONmail quietly stopped being a television product. ONnet came with a plug-in box carrying a 56K modem, and ONmail got a website at www.onmail.co.uk that did everything the TV version could not. Anyone who bought the ONnet box read their mail there instead. The people who had only ever bought the keyboard remote stayed on the purple screens. The ONnet launch date is contested in the sources: the ONmail article says June 2000, while ONdigital's own timeline and the ITV Digital article both give 18 September 2000.

~ the dossier ~

~ the keyboard you had to buy ~

That £30 remote carried the whole model on its back. After the one purchase there was no subscription at all: you paid local call charges to the dial-in number and nothing beyond that, which in 2000 made an email address cheap for a household with no computer in it. The Science Museum's own note on the artifact is that only a small fraction of ONdigital subscribers ever took it up.

Those museum holdings matter more than they look. The Science Museum Group cataloged an OnMail ONdigital set-top box along with an ONmail etiquette flyer, so somebody at ONdigital decided a television audience needed telling how to behave in email. I want to read that flyer more than anything else surviving from the period.

~ three weeks past its own funeral ~

ONmail had already been given a closing date of 18 April 2002 and it sailed straight through it. ITV Digital went into administration in March and took its channels off the air on 1 May, and on 3 May the service was still running: set-top box access worked as normal apart from the new email icon, which could not appear because the multiplexes that carried it no longer existed. An email service outliving the broadcaster it was attached to is a strange sight, and it lasted nineteen more days.

On 22 May 2002 the phone line stopped accepting incoming calls and every box in the country lost its mailbox at once. The website kept working for a while after that, which is the only part of the story nobody wrote down a date for. onmail.co.uk today is a Saw.com page offering the domain for sale, and the box itself sits in a museum with a flyer explaining how to use it.

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