So Long, Ziplip

The first free email account I had after college was a Ziplip account, and back in 2000 it was pretty cool. It prided itself on being free and extremely secure. I had mostly stopped using the account because I like Gmail, and my free Ziplip only has 2.5 MB of storage (and a cumbersome interface), but it was a sentimental favorite and a great repository for airline junkmail, email from the John Kerry campaign, and stuff I genuinely wanted secure, like my correspondance with the Detroitster.com domain registrar.

Because of this, it was a surprise to log on a couple of months ago to find this:

Thank you for using ZipLip’s free secure mail service. We appreciate your patronage and wish to inform you that we will be discontinuing our service on June 30th, 2005. For various reasons, including new U.S. legislation which significantly impacts the individual’s privacy rights, ZipLip is no longer able to provide its free secure email services with any reasonable assurance of privacy and security, particularly in the context of a hosted service. We will revisit the service issue when our legislature reinstates our privacy rights.

So now it is June 20, and in ten days I will no longer have a Ziplip account. I have been cleaning out the mailbox and forwarding mail to my other accounts, and I am going to share a few of the things I saved with you in subsequent posts. Bye Ziplip, thanks for the megabytes.