OperaMail.com

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

~ the eulogy ~

Opera Software built a web browser in Oslo and then, like most of the companies that shipped a browser in the late nineties, decided its users should have an email address too. The oldest surviving OperaMail login page was archived on 12 December 1998. It is one form and a logo whose alt text reads "Opera Software - where more is in less, and less is more!". Behind the form sat an IMAP mailbox, which was a fairly serious thing to hand out for free that year. Opera eventually shipped a desktop mail client as well, the M2 engine that was cut loose as the standalone Opera Mail in 2013. That is a different product with a nearly identical name, and the two of them overlapped for a decade.

The free version lasted a little over three years. On 1 March 2002 FastMail.FM published instructions for OperaMail users who wanted out, because OperaMail was closing its free IMAP service, and the migration ran through FastMail's own POP Links screen with operamail.com typed in as the source server. Inside a month the domain was a different product altogether. A capture from late March 2002 opens with "Welcome to new OperaMail!" and carries a meta description that gives the whole thing away: "Powered by Outblaze Free E-mail service".

In 1998 I was getting online over a modem that peaked at 33.6k, and the free mailbox everyone around me signed up for was Hotmail. OperaMail was never on that list. Opera itself was, a little, because it was what people recommended when a page would not finish loading and because downloading it did not cost you an afternoon. That the same company also ran an IMAP server for strangers is something I only learned much later, long after the address had stopped being something people chose and become something they were keeping.

~ the outsourcing ~

Outblaze was a Hong Kong company that ran white-label webmail for a few hundred brands, and from 2002 operamail.com was one of them. The mailbox was no longer Opera's engineering problem, just Opera's logo on somebody else's product. Outblaze sold its messaging business to IBM in 2009.

Opera then bought Fastmail in 2010, which put the company that had absorbed the 2002 refugees inside the company they had fled. Fastmail's staff bought themselves back in 2013 and went independent again, but kept handling mail for operamail.com on Opera's behalf, because the domain had always belonged to Opera and never to them. That arrangement held for another eight years with no visible seam.

~ the dossier ~

~ who still had one ~

By the end the population was people who had held the same address for twenty years and had wired it into everything: bank logins, and the recovery address on half their other accounts. When the news hit Hacker News in April 2021 the top comments were from people working out what a legacy address is actually worth, and whether a domain you do not own can ever really be yours.

~ the fifteen months of warning ~

Opera told Fastmail in February 2021 that it would no longer allow them to handle mail through the domain. Notifications to users started on 15 February 2021, and the wind-down that followed was unusually patient for a free service. Anyone who had not picked a replacement username by 30 March 2022 had one assigned.

Then the three switches. Sending from an @operamail.com address was disabled on 6 June 2022. Mail addressed to one began bouncing on 13 June. On 27 June the ability to log in to Fastmail with the address was turned off, and the personal sites people had parked at youraddress.operamail.com stopped loading on the same day. The domain still resolves, and it redirects to opera.com.

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