Tuesday 4 August 2009

Macmail.com is (probably) gone

For years now, seven, eight?, I've had a mail account on www.macmail.com, originally because they were fairly unique in offering both free web based access and pop access (for those of you with short memories, it's only recently hotmail let you have pop access), which mean you could have an sccount you could send and receive test emails from, and various other bits of testing including testing mail clients.

It's been useful and so I've kept using it on and off. One thing that was very useful was the fact that the webclient they used was Squirrelmail which has the merits of being written in php, being fairly sparse, and guaranteed to work in almost any browser.

And its gone. Since Jun21 my gmail has been able to poll their server to collect email and attempts to login to the web interface have similarly failed. If you google for macmail, you'll see a scad of bulletin board messages from people reporting the same experience, and since it'd been over six weeks it looks pretty final.

So I'm guessing they're gone for good.

I have this fantasy of their dead servers sitting in a rack in a hosting company somwhere, abandoned and gathering dust as someone tries to work out what if anything to do about them ...

1 comment:

dgm said...

mail.ireland.com, the Irish Times email service provides a nice web only Zimbra implementation (no POP or Imap access) and webmail.co.za similarly provides a squirrelmail servce and a fax to email service, albeit with a South African (+27) fax number. Both are ideal for testing and experimenting with ...