Mark Lyn­der­say

It isn't every day that an en­tire email do­main sim­ply goes away, but that's set to hap­pen on June 30 when TSTT re­tires the @tstt.net.tt ser­vice it's of­fered to its In­ter­net cus­tomers for al­most two decades.When TSTT en­tered the ISP busi­ness, it did so on the heels of Opus Net­worx and In­ter­serv, and a free email ad­dress was, back then, some­thing of a sell­ing point.

By 2007, when Google in­tro­duced its Google Apps Part­ner Edi­tion (http://ow.ly/NFwFd), an email ad­dress had al­ready be­come a sell­er's com­mod­i­ty and one that In­ter­net busi­ness­es saw as a way to seize and hold the at­ten­tion and loy­al­ty of cus­tomers.Peo­ple were get­ting used to us­ing email for free, giv­ing at­ten­tion to web ads and sur­ren­der­ing a bit of pri­va­cy in ex­change for an ef­fi­cient, no-cost com­mu­ni­ca­tions so­lu­tion.

To­day, the land­scape is even more chal­leng­ing for any­one hop­ing to make mon­ey from email ser­vices. Not on­ly is the pro­to­col gen­er­al­ly re­gard­ed as some­thing one gets for free, a new gen­er­a­tion of young peo­ple don't use it at all.I can't re­call a time over the last five years when some­one un­der 30 asked me for my email ad­dress as a way to con­tact me on the In­ter­net.

All the email I get from that set is sent through man­dat­ed cor­po­rate chan­nels along with du­bi­ous­ly le­gal dis­claimers du­ti­ful­ly ap­pend­ed to their sig­na­tures.I sus­pect for some­one turn­ing 21 this year, email must look like fax­es did to the first gen­er­a­tion to take to the web, a loony anachro­nism that one ac­cept­ed with good hu­mour and zipped lips.

On Fri­day, the com­pa­ny is­sued a press re­lease an­nounc­ing the im­mi­nent end of their email ser­vices (http://ow.ly/NFAcM).From that per­spec­tive, the de­ci­sion to re­tire their ISP mail ser­vice af­ter Google an­nounced the end of its free email sup­port ser­vice for ISPs makes per­fect sense.Of course, so did the switch to Google for sup­port ser­vices, in 2007.

In a post to Google's blog on May 18, 2007, prod­uct man­ag­er Hunter Mid­dle­ton promised in the avun­cu­lar style the com­pa­ny af­fect­ed then, "You can quit spend­ing your re­sources and time on ap­pli­ca­tions like Web mail –and leave the work to our busy bees at the Google­plex." Well, the Google­plex has moved on, and so too must TSTT.

At this point TSTT is prob­a­bly man­ag­ing a few thou­sand cus­tomers us­ing the do­main, some of whom may on­ly re­ly on it in­ter­mit­tent­ly.Vi­nood Radge Coomar, EVP of Res­i­den­tial Ser­vices & De­liv­ery for TSTT, de­clined to re­spond to a query about the ex­act num­ber of per­sons af­fect­ed by the shut­down of the com­pa­ny's e-mail. He did note, how­ev­er, that, "Of the to­tal num­ber of email ac­counts pro­vid­ed, less than 18 per cent are ac­tive so the ma­jor­i­ty of cus­tomers will not be af­fect­ed by the dis­con­tin­u­a­tion of the ser­vice."

The prob­lem it's go­ing to face over the next 28 days is that these are the cus­tomers who won't un­der­stand a word of its ex­ten­sive FAQs (http://ow.ly/NFziI) and will call for greater than nor­mal hand­hold­ing, quite pos­si­bly in per­son, be­fore they can be hap­py cus­tomers again.I know some of these peo­ple, and this is go­ing to be a prob­lem. It's cu­ri­ous that the com­pa­ny hasn't cho­sen to con­tin­ue of­fer­ing the ser­vice.

It's not as if it's par­tic­u­lar­ly dif­fi­cult to do, nor for a small cus­tomer base, par­tic­u­lar­ly ex­pen­sive. The @wow.net email ser­vice lurched along for more than a decade af­ter that ISP went out of busi­ness and any­one with a Mac can buy the serv­er edi­tion of the Mac OS (US$20, http://ow.ly/NFzJV), get a fixed IP ad­dress (not cheap, ad­mit­ted­ly) and roll their own.

Ac­cord­ing to Mr Radge Coomar, of the cloud based ser­vices that ride the com­pa­ny's net­works, Google's are the most pop­u­lar. "Three years ago TSTT al­so be­came a re­seller of Google Apps for Busi­ness ser­vices as this type of val­ue added ser­vice for col­lab­o­ra­tion and doc­u­ment shar­ing is not an area in which TSTT can com­pete ef­fec­tive­ly against such large op­er­a­tors," he ex­plained.

But hard­ware and soft­ware may not be all that TSTT has to con­sid­er here.Over the next year, it will be part­ing com­pa­ny with a pow­er­ful busi­ness part­ner who isn't leav­ing the busi­ness, just switch­ing sides to be­come their ri­vals.If TSTT doesn't get lucky with court­ing a sug­ar dad­dy with deep pock­ets, it's go­ing to have to get used to liv­ing much lean­er and wor­ry­ing about email it doesn't earn mon­ey from might be start­ing to look a lot like some­thing it should be do­ing with­out.