Yahoo Oddpost

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

~ the goodbye ~

the demographic that paid four dollars a month for a fast webmail in 2002 was a specific kind of u.s. tech-forward power user. that was not my crowd. in 2002 i was nineteen, on ttnet adsl in the dorm if i was lucky and on a 56k home dialup if i was not, and the question of whether yahoo mail or hotmail loaded fast enough was a question with a free answer.

oddpost was founded by ethan diamond and iain lamb and launched april 4 2002. it ran in internet explorer on windows, with a three-pane layout that mimicked outlook, and used what would later be called ajax to update the dom without full page reloads. the team measured screen efficiency carefully. diamond noted in a 2003 interview that yahoo mail at 1024x768 used about 30% of the screen for actual email and the rest for navigation and dead space.

yahoo acquired oddpost on 9 july 2004 for an undisclosed sum, generally reported as around twenty million dollars. the engine became the foundation for the yahoo mail rewrite that entered closed beta on 14 september 2005. by 2007 yahoo had migrated everyone off the oddpost servers, and the brand was effectively gone. the people kept their oddpost addresses inside yahoo, the same way rocketmail users did, but the product was over.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

oddpost was a paid product in a category that had been free since 1996. the pitch was speed. hotmail and yahoo mail were doing full page reloads on every click in 2002, and the network of the day made every click cost a noticeable wait. oddpost loaded an application shell once and updated only the diff. people who lived in their email noticed. four dollars a month was less than the time they were burning.

the technology stack was honestly impressive for 2002. javascript drove the ui, the server returned compact datapacks rather than full pages, and the whole thing ran inside microsoft internet explorer when ajax was not yet a word people used. gmail launched two months before yahoo bought oddpost, which is probably not a coincidence.

~ what it became ~

the new yahoo mail beta in september 2005 was the oddpost team's rewrite of yahoo's existing webmail using the oddpost engine. ethan diamond and iain lamb stayed on at yahoo to drive it. the resulting product looked nothing like the old yahoo mail and a lot like oddpost. it had drag-and-drop with keyboard shortcuts and an outlook-style three-pane layout that the new gmail did not have either. this gave yahoo mail a couple of years of being arguably the best webmail in the world, before gmail caught up and then surpassed it. by 2012 it was no longer in the conversation.

~ what remains ~

the ajax-webmail-as-desktop-app pattern is the oddpost legacy. every webmail since assumes you only load the application once and update incrementally. that was not assumed in 2002. ethan diamond left yahoo around 2007 and went on to co-found bandcamp, which is itself a story of patience with an alternative business model. iain lamb was less public about what came next.

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