I met you first at a Kinko’s in 1996. All those copies – seems a bit wasteful now. We’d gather ‘round in our blue aprons to watch those crazy-expensive color prints come spitting out, then we’d check our Hotmail. I know your buddy Kinko’s would have some stories to tell. I still can’t believe Microsoft finally pulled your plug today.
Even though I had a perfectly fine Telnet account, the copy boss made us all sign up for Hotmail. You were the first free webmail service I had ever used, that any of us had used. You were a revelation: internet savvy, promiscuous when it came to hardware, and free. Most of all you were free.
After some time with you, I remember asking, why do they call it “spam?” A little more time, and I understood. Still, there had to be something more important lurking inside of you than guaranteed penile enlargements and Nigerian Princes with money to send me. Why else would Microsoft have paid the then ungodly sum of $400 million for you?
None of us would be standing here today at our standing desks, dripping in gratis services from Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and yes, your corporate parent Microsoft, were it not for you. All those sweaty Internet cafés on that trip through Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia would have been useless without you. Sure I had my password stolen along with my passport in Jakarta, but those were good times, and back then, who cared? You were up to something bigger.
You pioneered a business model. In your own lifetime, this awkward web service from Silicon Valley altered the world’s notion of fair exchange (and later on, what privacy we were willing to throw away). Most people didn’t know it at the time, but we had become the product. It made me feel proud to be a part of a new phase of online commerce. Maybe that Amazon.com would amount to something after all.
When even my aunt in Central California decided it was time to go online I sent her to you. “Hot males?” she tittered on the phone. “I don’t think that would be right.” After I spelled it out, she signed up. Everyone did, hundreds of millions. Oh, the aliases I knew.
Now that you are in a better place, alongside GeoCities,PointCast, Boo.com and the rest of your chums in some push-media beyond I can confess this: there was never any “hot” in my Hotmail. I used you as a repository for all the spammy mailing lists I subscribed to. And, when I started buying things online, as a place to file those electronic receipts. All my email wooing was done on Telnet. But as a spam catcher, you were the best. Even after I, and everyone I knew, had moved on to Gmail, I want to thank you for that.
Since I haven’t checked you for years, I am guessing there were thousands of unread messages clogging even your generous storage. Now it is too late for a final inbox cleaning. It would have been nice to spend one last time together banishing the fake princes and counterfeit drug sellers. But that won’t happen. I regret that now.
Cher, in her heart-wrenching remembrance of Sonny Bono, recalled a section in the Reader's Digest called "The Most Unforgettable Character I've Ever Met." You, Hotmail are not that character for me. In large part, it’s because you are a web-based email service rather than a person. I am going to side with Cher on this one: Sonny Bono all the way.
Hotmail RIP: thanks for all the spam.
