
IncrediMail shutting down on March 20 - O1111OOO
http://www.incredimail.com/en
======
phsource
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...](http://web.archive.org/web/20200225122954/http://www.incredimail.com/en/home)

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

~~~
iforgotpassword
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.

~~~
m-p-3
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)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_\(instant_messaging\))

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ornornor
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.

------
shafyy
> 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?

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

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amelius
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.

------
Meph504
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.

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godzillabrennus
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.

~~~
Ygg2
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.

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

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

~~~
rpeden
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.

~~~
eisa01
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

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Shamanoid
My grandpa is going to be mad...

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

~~~
SyneRyder
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.)

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jdlyga
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.

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rekabis
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.

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ksec
>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.

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

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Kiro
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.

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

------
Bucephalus355
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](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?

~~~
1123581321
An upcoming service that should be more trustworthy, based on the reputation
of Basecamp, is [https://hey.com/](https://hey.com/)

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

