PocoMail

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

~ the eulogy ~

PocoMail reached Turkey the way all shareware did, as a trial that worked perfectly and a registration screen that did not apply to you. Around 2000 a home user here mostly did not hold a card that could send forty dollars to a foreign software house, so the program ran unregistered for as long as it would let you, and then you went back to whatever had come with Windows. The shareware model could look healthy in one country and stay entirely invisible in another for exactly this reason, and the software itself had nothing to do with it.

What it was, for anyone who did pay: a small Windows mail client from Poco Systems, first out in 1999, speaking POP3 and IMAP and handling several accounts from one window. It rendered HTML mail when you wanted it and refused to when you did not. It was fast and it was tiny, in an era when the free alternative on every desktop was Outlook Express and the paid one everybody respected was Eudora.

Version 2.64 was current in April 2003. The last release, 4.8 build 4400, came out on 6 April 2009 as part of a deal with RoseCity Software that made PocoMail the upgrade path for users of Courier, another client that had run out of road. Development was discontinued in December 2011. By January 2012 pocomail.com had stopped being a website at all and was serving a meta refresh to a category page on pocosystems.com.

~ the dossier ~

~ the scripting language ~

The unusual part of PocoMail was PocoScript. Mail clients of that era were being asked to run scripts inside messages, and the way Microsoft had wired that up on Windows is how ILOVEYOU got into corporate networks in May 2000 and how the Anna Kournikova worm did the same thing nine months later. Poco's answer was to build a scripting engine that was neither JavaScript nor Windows Scripting Host, so the attack surface every worm of the period aimed at simply was not there.

That choice made PocoScript useful for other things too. Filters were written in it, and so was anything else you wanted the mailbox to do on its own. That is the reason the client kept a small population of people who had scripted a whole mail workflow into it and could not move without rewriting the lot. A Bayesian spam filter arrived later, which by then everybody had.

~ the shareware bargain ~

PC Magazine gave it Shareware Program of the Year in 2000. That award is worth understanding as an artifact: it existed because there was a whole software economy that shipped by download and worked before you paid, on the assumption that enough people would pay afterward. A two-person outfit could win a magazine award against Microsoft in a category Microsoft was giving away for free.

The economy died before the program did. Thunderbird arrived in 2004 costing nothing and asking for no license key, and Gmail opened the same year and ended the argument about where mail should live. By the late 2000s a paid mail client for Windows was a niche purchase rather than a normal one. PocoMail kept selling into that shrinking room until the room closed.

~ two domains paid to 2027 ~

Both pocomail.com and pocosystems.com are still registered, both at Tucows, paid up to 23 March 2027 and 30 July 2027. Neither of them answers. They point at DreamHost nameservers that reply with an SOA record and no address at all, which is a domain somebody is maintaining without hosting anything on it.

The serial number on the zone reads 2024121300, which in the usual convention is 13 December 2024. That is the last date anybody at Poco Systems touched the DNS, thirteen years after the last build of the product. The Wayback Machine's copies stop being a website somewhere in 2024 too, after a decade of nothing but redirects.

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