Thaimail

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

~ the obituary ~

Thaimail opened on 15 April 1997 as a free public service from ARIP, a Bangkok IT publishing company whose main business was magazines and trade shows. It was the first free email provider in Thailand, and the thing that made it the first was not the mail server. It was that the menus were in Thai. In 1997 the web was overwhelmingly an English-language object, and an interface in your own script was a reason on its own to sign up.

The address was yours at thaimail.com and you read it in a browser, which in 1997 was still a slightly exotic way to handle mail. Over the years ARIP bolted on the rest of a portal around the inbox: e-cards, chat rooms, a webboard, a classifieds section. By the end the service had over four million registered accounts, which in a country of sixty-something million people with far fewer than that online is a large number.

It stayed open for seventeen years and four months, and nothing dramatic ended it. Free email simply stopped being something a local publisher could offer as a favor to the national internet, and became something two American companies gave away at a scale no magazine business could match.

~ the case file ~

~ the slogan ~

The front page carried a line under the wordmark that read, in Thai, "email of Thai people, by Thai people, for Thai people." It is not subtle and it was not meant to be. In the late nineties a national free-mail service was a small piece of infrastructure and a small piece of pride at the same time, and ARIP was selling both.

Turkey ran the same experiment on the same clock and got the same answer. The local free-mail names here opened in the same window, collected their millions of accounts, and were then quietly abandoned by everyone who got an invitation to something better. I had a Hotmail address because MSN needed one, and later a Gmail address because someone sent me an invite. Neither of those decisions had anything to do with language, which is exactly the problem a Thai-language inbox eventually ran into.

~ the stale front page ~

By 2014 the site had stopped being maintained in any real sense. The capture from 2 August 2014, a month before the end, still had the news module running, and the featured article was headlined "7 great tips for Windows 7," with body text explaining that Microsoft would be releasing Windows 7 later this year. Windows 7 had shipped in October 2009. The front page of Thailand's first webmail provider had been advertising a five-year-old future for half a decade and nobody at ARIP had noticed, or had been assigned to notice.

~ the last morning ~

ARIP announced the closure on 27 June 2014, giving users about ten weeks. The notice was businesslike: the company was discontinuing Thaimail.com in order to adapt its services to current circumstances, effective 1 September, and during the interim users should back up their personal data. Under it sat a link to a 300-kilobyte PDF, a step-by-step manual for moving your mail out.

The archive caught the result at 09:12 on 1 September 2014. The whole site is 873 bytes by then, a blank page thanking the customers who had always used Thaimail and stating that ARIP was stopping the service from now on. The last line apologizes for the inconvenience. A year later the domain was serving 656 bytes. Today it does not resolve at all.

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