Shortmail

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

~ the obituary ~

410 Labs was two people in Baltimore, Dave Troy and Matt Koll, who started the company in June 2010 and shipped Shortmail the following July. The pitch fit on the home page under the wordmark: email, simplified. You got an address, you got a 500-character ceiling, and that was the deal. If you needed to send a file, Shortmail was not going to help you. If you needed folders, there were none.

The constraint was the feature and the company never pretended otherwise. The four selling points down the front page were Shorter, Social, Simpler and Better, and the explanation under the first one was just the rule restated: all emails are limited to 500 characters, messages are always short and to the point. Under Simpler it listed what was missing as if absence were a spec line: no attachments, no junk mail, no folder management.

It was taken seriously for a while. A $750,000 round landed in July 2011 from True Ventures, 500 Startups, Fortify Ventures and the Maryland Venture Fund. The press liked it: the testimonials the site kept on its own front page were one outlet calling it genius and another calling it Twitter for email, plus two ordinary users saying it had made them faster. MIT Technology Review ran a piece in February 2012 under a headline arguing that simpler email was better email.

Then 410 Labs built a second product called Mailstrom, which did the opposite thing. Instead of giving you a disciplined new inbox, it went into the undisciplined one you already had over IMAP and helped you cut it down. Mailstrom grew. Shortmail did not.

~ the case file ~

~ five hundred characters ~

I have never been able to decide whether this idea was right. The argument is sound on its face and it is the kind of argument an engineer finds immediately attractive: the format permits infinite length, so people use infinite length, so constrain the format. Twitter had just proved that a character limit could produce a whole new way of writing rather than a crippled version of the old one.

The flaw is that a character limit only works when everyone is inside it. Twitter's 140 was the whole world's 140. Shortmail's 500 was yours alone, and everyone you wrote to was still on Gmail with no limit at all, sending you four paragraphs you then had to answer in two sentences. You could sign up for the discipline but you could not sign anyone else up for it, which left you holding a constraint instead of a convention.

There was a practical escape hatch, and the company built it deliberately: IMAP, POP3 and SMTP all worked, so you could point a normal mail client at a Shortmail address and treat it as an ordinary mailbox that happened to shout at you past 500 characters. That is a tell. A product confident in its own rule does not usually ship a protocol that lets you route around it.

~ the bounce ~

The closing notice went out from Dave Troy and the 410 Labs team and it was unusually procedural, which in a shutdown is a compliment. The service would be discontinued on 31 July 2014. You could get your mail out any time before that by pointing a client at the account over IMAP or POP and downloading it. And there was a hard intermediate date: from 25 July, anything sent to a Shortmail address would bounce back to the sender rather than disappear.

That second date is the piece most shutdowns skip. The common pattern is that the address keeps accepting mail until the servers go off and then the mail goes nowhere, silently, for however long it takes the people writing to you to notice. Shortmail turned the address into an explicit rejection a week early, so everyone still writing to it got told. The notice also offered a coupon toward a Mailstrom subscription, which is a gentle way of saying where the team had gone.

~ folded into Mailstrom ~

Six weeks after Shortmail closed, 410 Labs picked up the users of TheSwizzle, a competing email tool that had shut down, and moved them into Mailstrom. The company that had spent three years arguing you should start a new inbox with better rules was now in the business of inheriting other people's inbox refugees.

shortmail.com still resolves today. It answers 200 on both schemes with a body of 114 bytes, which is a web server that has been configured and then left with nothing to serve. Twelve years after the last message bounced, the domain is still politely returning an empty page, well under the character limit.

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