SoftHome

» see softhome.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

SoftHome was a small American email and hosting provider that opened in 1996 and sold exactly one idea, stated in its own page description and left there for sixteen years: use us and you will not have to change your address ever again, not even when you change ISPs. In 1996 that was a real problem with a real price. Your email address was issued by the company selling you the phone line, and leaving for a cheaper provider meant telling everyone you knew that you had a new one.

What you got was an address at softhome.net, webmail to read it in, POP and SMTP so you could keep using your own mail program, and an offer of hosting if you wanted a domain. The free version carried advertising. There were paid tiers for people who wanted their mail without ads or who needed a commercial setup, and the price was in the ten-to-twenty-dollars-a-year range rather than anything serious.

It outlasted most of the companies it was selling against. It also outlasted the problem it was built for, because by the late 2000s the free address everyone used came from Google or Microsoft and nobody expected their ISP to supply identity at all.

~ the record ~

~ the promise ~

A permanent email address requires a permanent company, and the company here was a few people with mail servers and an advertising contract. The promise also lived in the HTML metadata, which is to say it was written for search engines as much as for readers, and it stayed in there unedited while the business under it was being cut back.

Where I was, this was not a service anyone considered. By 2002 everybody around me had a Hotmail address, because MSN Messenger needed one to sign in, and the Turkish portals handed out their own free accounts for anyone who wanted a local name. The idea of mailing a small American company a yearly fee so that your address would survive a change of ISP assumed an international payment habit and a belief that the address was worth defending. Neither was common.

~ what went first ~

The retreat is dated precisely, because SoftHome announced it. On 21 November 2005 the notice went out that starting 5 December 2005, POP and SMTP service would be available only to Professional subscribers, with webmail remaining open to everyone. The reason given was blunt: the advertising market had dried up some time ago and the company could no longer afford to shoulder a service without revenue. There was an introductory offer, 10.99 dollars a year, 25 percent off, if you signed up before 20 December.

That is the moment the free product became a trial for a paid one. Free users kept their address and lost the ability to use it from a mail client, which in 2005 was most of the point of having it.

~ the last capture ~

After that it decayed rather than closed. The last news item the front page ever carried was a warning about phishing activity and an instruction not to send your password to anyone, which sat there as the only headline for years. Users on mail forums describe customer service thinning out and then not answering at all.

The archive puts the ending in a two-month window. A working login page, signup box and all, was captured on 15 July 2012. By 18 September 2012 the same URL returns a stub of a few hundred bytes, and from December it is answering with a redirect. On 15 November 2012 a user wrote up her side of it: locked out of her SoftHome mailbox by a password error that looked like a compromise, with her bills and her shopping accounts tied to that address, emails to the company ignored and the phone going to voicemail. She filed a complaint with the FCC and moved to GMX.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »