[email protected]

» see soft.mail.ru as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

In 1998 a Russian directory portal called List.ru was opening thematic sections and wanted one for software. An independent developer named Stanislav Zharkov had already started building exactly that, and the two plans met. He became the catalog's administrator and moderator and then stayed in the job. List.ru was folded into Mail.Ru a few years later, and the software section came along with it under a new name and an email-style address.

What [email protected] did was plain enough, and it did it for sixteen years. An annotated catalog of free and shareware Windows software, sorted into categories and subcategories, with a rating for the week's programs, a list of new arrivals, a question and answer service and a forum. Beside it sat Soft-club, which by late 2004 had grown into a full IT news operation with an events calendar and a press release service attached. Developers could submit their own programs. Softline and Allsoft were brought in commercially to help those developers actually sell what they had written.

The catalogs I reached from Turkey were Tucows and the Simtel mirrors, and later whatever a Turkish hardware forum had linked to that week. [email protected] was the same machine built for a different alphabet, and there was no path by which a teenager in Ankara with no Russian was going to land on it. The category tree translates without any loss at all. Every country that got dial-up built one of these, and the local one was always the one people trusted over the international one.

~ the case file ~

~ one developer's catalog ~

Zharkov ran it the whole way through. Russian accounts describe him as the catalog's permanent administrator and moderator, the one person who never rotated out, which is an unusual thing to be able to say about a property owned by a company the size of Mail.Ru. The portal changed hands, changed design, changed its house style to match the rest of Mail.Ru in November 2004, and the person deciding whether a program was an archiver or a file manager stayed the same.

From 2007 the site ran an annual award called Soft of the Year. Each December it put up more than 250 nominated programs and collected votes from around 20,000 users, across categories including security, system tools, design and multimedia, and software for mobile devices. The winner lists are a clean cross-section of what was actually installed on a Russian-speaking desktop: Kaspersky Anti-Virus, the QIP messenger, the AIMP audio player, HDDlife, RadioClicker, Navitel Navigator. Almost none of those names carry outside the Russian-language internet. Inside it they were the defaults.

~ the day the partnership ended ~

On 16 December 2014 the collaboration with Softline was completed and the project was finalized. That is the entire record of the death: one sentence on Russian Wikipedia, no announcement post, no farewell page preserved anywhere I can find. A catalog that had been running since 1998 stopped because the commercial arrangement underneath it stopped, which is a quieter cause of death than a lawsuit and a more common one.

soft.mail.ru does not resolve today. The Internet Archive kept crawling the address into late 2016 and came back with nothing every time, which is what a dead subdomain inside a living company looks like from the outside.

By 2014 Mail.Ru had become a social network owner and a games publisher, and a hand-sorted shareware directory was no longer a business in a world where software installed itself out of an app store. Softline went on selling licenses. The catalog was the part of the arrangement that only one of them still needed.

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