Rocketmail Slowly Gets Grounded
by Gretchen Griffin

A few weeks ago I got an e-mail from Yahoo! informing me that it would no longer offer free POP3 access to its e-mail. As of April 24, I have to log on to Yahoo! to retrieve my messages, rather than have them whisked like magic into my Outlook inbox at work. I have the option, of course, of paying Yahoo! to stick with the current POP3 system — not likely for someone who still refuses to buy bottled water.

Now I face the minor inconvenience of replying to all my incoming Yahoo! mail with an address change that will keep my e-mail retrieval down to one step. Not so bad, really. So why am I a bit misty-eyed? Because this doesn't mean simply phasing out some dime-a-dozen Yahoo! account — it means finally retiring my Rocketmail.

OK, so it's not exactly putting down Old Yeller. And a dwindling number of Rocketmail accounts live on with other Yahoo! users. But my Rocketmail account has been with me since I first sputtered onto the "information superhighway" (back when that phrase could be used without ironic quote marks). I learned about it five years ago in the Village Voice's freshly minted Internet column, which marveled at the convenience of the new Web-based e-mail services for those Americans — there were millions of 'em! — who still lacked home Internet access. At the time I lacked so much as a home, so needless to say I was sold.

Rocketmail was launched by the online directory Four11 in March 1997, predating by six months Business Week's pronouncement, "Indeed, e-mail is beginning to look like the 'killer app' [quotation marks their own, presumably non-ironic] on the World Wide Web." Indeed! By the time Rocketmail was slurped up by Yahoo! for approximately $94 million that October, there were a million of us — and that was small potatoes compared to the nearly 10 million subscribers to Hotmail, which was already something of a monolith.

But unlike Hotmail, which around the same time was allowed to keep its maiden name when it joined Microsoft's harem, Rocketmail became an obsolete brand under Yahoo! Accounts opened during the company's short-lived independence, however, still bear the Rocketmail domain name. As a result, Rocketmail tags distinguish their owners as what sociologists call an "early majority" — objects of early-adopter scorn, perhaps, but still capable of coming off as old-skool digerati at holiday gatherings in the suburbs.

I'm nostalgic about my Rocketmail account partly because it marked the start of the most pleasurable period of my life to date — which of course is no coincidence. When Rocketmail first crossed my radar, the Internet was hitting its stride, spitting great wads of money into the wallets of people other than myself, while bestowing upon me the tangential benefits of a lusty economy, including the confidence to abandon security and change jobs, move to Europe, date casually and spend money on frivolities.

Best of all, those benefits came unencumbered by liberal guilt; the boom began closer to Haight Street than to Wall Street, and for a brief moment one could believe the pillars of the new economy were more Gordon Lightfoot than Gordon Gekko. But as San Francisco turned into a millionaire ghetto, it became clear the jig was up. In rooting for the underdog start-ups, anti-corporate lefties like my younger self had overlooked the fact that their founders were entrepreneurs and MBAs who, deny it though they might, were looking to make a buck.

Today, it's surprising it took so long after the tech flop for Yahoo! to put the kibosh on gratis POP3 access, which in effect made its service ad-free. Accessing my Rocketmail messages from the Web is inconvenient in part because there's been a steady degradation in functionality since Yahoo!'s takeover. Rocketmail was created back when Web sites were designed to be functional, not shepherd users deeper into the site's advertising maze. I can't even remember seeing ads on Rocketmail. What I do remember from the original site is its animated red-and-white rocket logo, not rocketing so much as boinging, over and over, in the top left corner of the front page.

That chipper little rocket is now buried deep in the Internet's archeological record, under an old sock puppet and a slush of launch-party ice sculptures. On the rare occasions I receive e-mail from other Rocketmail addresses, it feels like I've stumbled across an old comrade, and I toy ever so vaguely with the idea of starting some kind of fan club. But once we'd re-written the lyrics to Elton John's "Rocket Man," there'd be little else to do — and besides, we'd be faced with the awkward irony of organizing ourselves on Yahoo! Groups.

So I'll just wave, and wipe away a tear as Rocketmail disappears into the ether, taking with it traces of the departed days of Internet idealism and my profligate semi-youth. And then I'll go back to my desk and figure out what to do with the eight e-mail addresses that came with my new DSL account.

E-mail Gretchen Griffin at gretchgriff at mindspring dot com.