Sha-Mail Card (写メールカード)

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

~ the eulogy ~

Sha-mail was the thing that made camera phones ordinary in Japan. J-Phone shipped a handset with a camera in the back in November 2000 and built a picture-mail service around it. Inside a year the word was in everyone's mouth. That service has its own history and most of it is told elsewhere on this site. This is about the small business that grew on top of it, which took the photograph back off the network and put it into the post.

Vodafone started Sha-Mail Card at 11:00 on 4 November 2003, a month and three days after it had finished painting its own name over J-Phone. You mailed a picture from your handset to [email protected]. A reply came back carrying a link to a design site, where you typed the delivery address and whatever you wanted written on the card. Somebody then printed it and dropped it in the mail. A plain postcard with your photo and four lines of twenty characters cost 190 yen. Adding an envelope made it 250.

The whole thing ran through that one mail address, and that is also why it never meant anything outside Japan. The gateway only accepted pictures sent from a handset subscribed to a Japanese carrier's picture-mail service, and sha-mail was a Vodafone trademark besides. There was no web upload and no way in from a computer. This was not a product you could want your way into from another country.

~ the dossier ~

~ the talking card ~

The catalog had four types and the expensive one is the one worth remembering. For 1,900 yen you got a card and an envelope that played back about ten seconds of recorded voice. There was also a sticker sheet, sixteen panels at 24 by 17 millimeters, for 500 yen.

Two options cost nothing and both are stranger than the paid ones. You could attach an online message, around thirty seconds of audio parked on a server, which the person holding the card retrieved by ringing a telephone number. And you could nominate New Year's Day for delivery, with orders taken up to 12 December, which is the single most Japanese feature any of this had. The first stretch, to the end of March 2004, was formally a trial, with proper service meant to begin that April.

~ the shrinking catalog ~

By 2007 the notice board on its own site had turned into a record of retreat. On 1 November 2007 it announced that the sticker type and the laminated card type had both stopped selling at the end of October. The same notice said the plain postcard would go back on sale on the 7th, and on that day print prices were flattened to 99 yen across the board. In January 2008 the New Year's cards sold out, which was the last piece of good news it ever posted.

What was left by then was a mail-order print shop. The talking card and the stickers were both gone. A service that launched with four ways to send a picture was down to one. Its header image never caught up, and went on promising stickers and nail-art variants to the end. Its image file carries a Photoshop save date of November 2006.

~ the last chance sale ~

The notice went up on 30 July 2008 and it is still readable in a capture taken seven weeks later, which is longer than the service itself lasted after posting it. It thanks everyone for using Sha-Mail Card over a long period and says that it will regrettably end at the end of August 2008. Then, without a line break to separate the two thoughts, it tells readers that this is their last chance and asks them to please order a treasured photograph.

No reason is given anywhere on the page. Japanese Wikipedia's list of discontinued SoftBank services carries the row with the same date and no footnote at all, so for years the only citable source for this death was an unsourced line in a list. The notice was sitting on the product's own front page the whole time.

The fine print at the bottom of that final page names the arrangement plainly. SoftBank Mobile provided it and a company called IMD operated it, with sha-mail itself registered as SoftBank's trademark. It was born under one corporate name and died under another. The address you mailed the picture to never changed.

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