IncrediMail shutting down on March 20 | Hacker News Reader

IncrediMail shutting down on March 20

incredimail.com

53 pointsO1111OOO32 comments

Looking through the Wayback Machine, it seems like this was a funky styled-email service that allows sending emails with backgrounds, emojis, etc.:

http://web.archive.org/web/20200225122954/http://www.incredi...

Definitely something whose time seems to have passed, and probably legacy for a couple of years judging by the "Windows 7" support badge on the bottom; I'm not quite sure how this is newsworthy, but then again, it's always interesting to see a relic from another age

Back in the days of AOL and bonzi buddy, I used incredimail for a bit.

Kinda surprised they can't make a profit by injecting ads into every email sent and received and leaving everything else in maintanance mode. Perhaps that's what they've been doing already for the last decade.

Oh Yes, that name brings back memories.

One day the mails from one aunt started looking exceptionally silly with background images, animated gifs, fonts, you name it. Next time I paid her a visit I saw that she switched from outlook express to Incredimail. And oh boy, that client looked as atrocious as the mails it produced.

I remember some of my relatives using it at the time, and I was using MSN Messenger slightly before it became a mess with nudge[1] (allows you to shake the window of another participant and make some noise, that went as well as you'd think) and other unnecessary features.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_(instant_messaging)

Believe it or not but I have a client who still use it. I’ve been telling him for ages to stop.

Hope now he will.

Why would he? It's not like modern desktop email applications have any more features than the ones we used 20 years ago. If he is comfortable with the UX...

Sometimes it's not about features, but unfixed security flaws.

And this particular one had a bad reputation of installing adware and all back in the days

I remember this! They made this email client they let you insert tons of GIFs and other smileys into your email. Was pretty cool at the time when outlook express was the only mainstream alternative.

> With nearly 4 million customers, 270 million emails sent and 116 million designs downloaded [...]

The email to customer ratio strikes me as super low (67.5 emails per customer on average) for a product that existed for 20 years, no?

Maybe... although most people send a lot fewer emails than they receive.

The graphics seem very similar to what is available in Whatsapp and FB Messenger.

If this is popular, it makes me wonder why not every email client offers these. Probably because of the decline of email for personal use.

When was this announcement made?

Seems less than a month to migrate off 4 million users (or whatever remnants of that) isn't much time.

You would think their client would allow some sort of export method, and that would be worth mentioning. Assuming email providers have backups seems foolhardy, people still using their service don't seem the type that are using Modern technology.

Sad to see after 20 years they are pulling out like that.

Seems sudden to shut down a service of 20 years with two week notice.

Then again, I don’t even know what they do so it’s not something I’m going to miss.

AFAIU the client itself didn't work for at least a few years. Mostly since Win 10 became the norm.

They were selling an email client that had "advanced features". Features that include:

- animation as notification. E.g. a batler appears with posh accent saying "You have mail, sir"

- you can send animation and sounds in message. When I used it, it sent embedded flash animations and sounds

- you can customize its looks

- always on top mailbox, if you remember downloaders of yore, their always on top url drop point

There were some more technically interesting features, but its selling point was cosmetics.

Still, they say "Our first priority is to help make this transition as easy as possible for you." and give two weeks?

It’s an email client. It’s replaced in 10 minutes. Is 2 weeks not enough?

Migrating old emails over to a new client might be non-trivial. My grandfather has many years of emails and attachments stored in Incredimail - some of whom have passed away, so he'd really like to keep these emails.

I've backed up his Incredimail email database, and will have to find a way to import them into Thunderbird or something similar.

Yup. Back when Incredimail was popular, IMAP was not as widespread.

I moved my mom over from Incredimail to Thunderbird 10 years ago, but I don't think I managed to import the message history... Now she's on gmail instead of the internet provider email (that has since been switched several times), so no longer an issue

My grandpa is going to be mad...

My aunt uses this. What's next for people like her ? thunderbird ?

Probably Thunderbird, but maybe consider looking at Postbox. Their latest version includes a variety of colourful themes, and it seems that customising the visual appearance is very important to IncrediMail users.

(For context, I have a small business making Photoshop plug-ins, and a lot of my customer support emails were from IncrediMail users. I've seen a few bright yellow Comic Sans emails on purple background with animated smiley-face GIFs. The point of IncrediMail seems to have been to make emails more like the penpal letter writing stationery kits you can find at a scrapbooking store. The customers used my Photoshop plug-in to design plaid backgrounds that they used as stationery in their outgoing IncrediMail HTML emails. I did find that the IncrediMail users were among the friendliest and nicest when dealing with their support emails.)

I had no idea IncrediMail was still around. I used it in the early 2000s before I discovered Thunderbird. The sound effects and animations were fun until they got annoying.

About bloody time.

I used to think Outlook was the worst thing to happen to eMail, what with its top-posting and HTML/RTF formatting, but then Incredimail came along and gave an entirely new dimension to “this is a really bad idea”.

For the record, I still do eMail _the right way:_ bottom-posting, plain-text only _by default._

Thank you, Thunderbird, for still maintaining sane traditional settings.

>With nearly 4 million customers,

4 Million customers is a lot. I am surprised by this figure and it would have been a success for many other software. Why was it discontinued? Is 4 Million not enough to be sustainable?

I wonder if HN even has 4 Million Active Viewers.

Either I’m imagining things or this was posted months ago here.

People like to complain about Google terminating services but when they close down something they will at least give me a proper notice period, not two weeks.

Google One Today, 1,5 months ago, ~8 days notice: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22184937

Incredimail wasn't an SaaS so the impact isn't particularly high. It's just an email client which can be fairly easily replaced albeit without the ability to add 1990's style backgrounds and large animated emoji to outgoing emails.

Email today has grown very dark and is definitely not the fun whimsical world they mention it was when they started their business in the 1990's.

I vaguely remember this world. I was 10 before I understood that you could access the internet through a variety of ways, you didn't just have to use the default AOL browser my parents had.

Something disturbing regarding email though. Recently on Twitter I've seen ads for https://theXYZ.com, an email platform the purports to be both ad free and surveillance free mostly. This is not true for a few reasons technical reasons that most sysadmins can spot reading through their copy. More concerning though all of the pictures of their "company" and "data centers" appear to be stock images that have floated around on the internet for years. Who would do this and lie so brazenly?

> Who would do this and lie so brazenly?

Any marketing team?

An upcoming service that should be more trustworthy, based on the reputation of Basecamp, is https://hey.com/

The entire premise seems to be that email was once fun and worry-free, and can become that again.

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