Sify Mail

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

~ the eulogy ~

The part of the Indian internet I can actually compare something to is the cybercafe. By August 2003 the company that ran this mailbox had more than a thousand i-Way cafes open across India, and I spent 2002 to 2005 in the Turkish version of the same room: rows of machines with Counter-Strike on them and an hourly rate at the desk. Same business, different country, except that in India the chain was owned by the ISP itself.

Satyam Infoway was the first private internet service provider in India, incorporated on 12 December 1995 and founded by R. Ramaraj. In October 1999 it listed on NASDAQ with Merrill Lynch underwriting, the first Indian internet company to get there. For about eighteen months it was the biggest thing in the Indian dot-com story.

Then it went shopping. In November 1999 it took a 24.5 percent stake in IndiaWorld Communications for 122.2 crore rupees and finished buying the rest by 30 June 2000, a deal reported around a hundred and fifteen million dollars and still the reference point for Indian internet exits. IndiaWorld came with samachar.com, a one-page news aggregator running about four million page views a month. The portal built out of all of it was sify.com, and the free mailbox came attached.

Sify Mail sat well below Rediffmail and Yahoo on any Indian inbox count, and then Gmail took the category away from all of them. Inertia kept it going anyway. You got the address because you were already a Sify subscriber, which is why small traders and relatives abroad were still typing @sify.com into forms in 2014, thirteen years after they first typed it.

~ the dossier ~

~ the hundred and fifteen million ~

The IndiaWorld purchase is the reason anyone in Indian tech still says the word Sify with any weight behind it. Rajesh Jain had built IndiaWorld out of a handful of properties, samachar for news and khoj for search among them, and sold the lot into the top of the dot-com market. It is the deal that told a generation of Indian founders an exit was a thing that could happen to them.

Satyam Computer Services sold its 31.61 percent of Sify to Raju Vegesna's Infinity Capital Ventures in November 2005 for about 62.62 million dollars, three years before the Satyam accounting fraud took the parent company apart. Sify came through that untouched and turned into an enterprise networking and data center business, which is what it still is.

~ thirty june ~

The closure went out as a run of mailers through June 2014, the fourth of them dated 23 June with a week left on the clock. Users were told the service would stop at the end of the month and that they should move their contents to another mail account. Nobody recorded a migration tool or a forwarding offer.

Sify's own topics page for mail had already become somewhere people arrived to ask whether their login still worked. The addresses stopped resolving on 30 June 2014, fourteen years after the portal they belonged to went up, and the company that built India's first private ISP left consumer email for good.

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