TheSwizzle

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

~ the last words ~

American retail email is a specific kind of problem. Every store you have ever bought a single item from writes to you twice a week until one of you dies, and by 2012 there was a small industry trying to make that survivable. My inbox in Turkey had its own clutter in those years, but it was not that clutter. Turkish retail had not yet built the mailing-list habit at anything like American scale.

TheSwizzle was one of the better attempts at the problem. It did not ask you to move house. It worked alongside the email account you already had, taking the commercial mail out of the way and delivering it back once a day as a single digest you could skim or ignore. If you wanted a sender gone for good it would do the unsubscribing on your behalf, which at the time meant hunting a link at the bottom of a message and hoping the link was honest.

Behind it was Scott Kurnit, who had founded About.com and sold it to Primedia for $724 million in 2001. His next company, Keep Holdings, was founded in New York in March 2010 and ran several products at once, among them AdKeeper, which let you save advertisements you liked. TheSwizzle was the one that solved a problem people complained about out loud.

~ the record ~

~ the pitch ~

The press wave came in October 2012. Mashable wrote it up on the third and PCMag on the seventeenth. The framing was always the same, because the product had exactly one idea and it was a good one: your inbox is not full of mail, it is full of marketing, so separate the two and you have your inbox back.

The high-water mark was June 2013, when Walt Mossberg wrote about it in AllThingsD. He reviewed it next to Mailstrom, a Baltimore product that attacked the same mess from the opposite direction, going into your existing inbox over IMAP and helping you delete at scale. Two tools against one complaint, in one review. Fourteen months later one of them owned the other one's users.

~ the money that never came ~

In September 2014 the notice went out. "Our hopes of keeping it free have been dashed," the Swizzle team wrote, and then explained the mechanism plainly: the product "was designed to be advertiser supported but that just hasn't come to pass." A free tool that sorts advertising for you turns out to be an awkward place to sell advertising.

The users went to Mailstrom, run by 410 Labs of Baltimore, who moved them over the following weeks on a free trial. That company had closed its own email product, Shortmail, on 31 July that year, so the inheritance ran in a strange direction: a firm that had just failed at a new inbox spent September absorbing the refugees of somebody else's. The domain today serves a Louisiana nonprofit that has nothing to do with any of it.

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