…Clueless

No. I’m not on a In.com bashing/loving/reporting spree here. It just so happened that I was browsing both the websites side by side when I noticed the favicons on their respective tabs.

Now, is it just me or the “in” part in both the logos seem kind of similar. The similar background colour, similar text colour and except for a few minor tweaks, the “in” looks quite the same. Now, this could be a far-fetched theory but I’m just writing what I feel (and what I see!).

It was the 1st of August, 2008. I came to know about a website, “in.com”, which had been launched by the guys at Web18 and offered free email accounts @in.com. The offer seemed lucrative to me. In.com is a very tiny domain and I wanted an email address on it, jus for the cosmetic value of the address.

I went over to the website. It clearly said that it was in “beta” stage (testing). I registered for a couple of addresses just for the heck of testing out the service. Then I thought of creating an ID with some special characters. I tried underscore, hyphen and a dot. The minimum number of characters for an ID was 4. Then a brilliant (exaggeration) idea struck me. What if I could compensate some of the characters in my ID with special characters?!!!

Hyphen (-) and underscore (_) are so Web 1.0. I stuck with dot (.). Now, just to test my hypothesis, I typed four dots (….) in the “Email Id” space on the registration page. Immediately, below the form element, it said “Account Available : Yes” !! I never expected this. Seriously. I had my idea in my head but had never expected the software to be vulnerable to it. I went over to the next step and tried to register but it failed.

I hurried back to the registration page again and this time I put it “..in” as my ID. Sure enough, it was available. I went to the next step and BOOM! I was in! Now you, I and everybody would say, what’s the big deal with an email address that starts with two stupid periods? Well the thing is, the in.com website magically eliminated the dots from my id and now I had a shiny 2 letter username on their website, which I supposedly could not have had.

I had “in@in.com” with me. I logged in with “..in” and seperately with “in” and I got into my mailbox successfully. This email address was tiny, very tiny! I liked it just for that. The interface kind of sucked. Yes, they tried to make it all Web 2.0 with ajax and stuff but it was still slow and buggy. On top of that, their SPAM filter was and still is simply useless. And SPAM was the biggest reason that I never really suck to this tiny email address that I had acquired.

It seemed that every third person on this planet earth, who registered for any serive on the web, typed in their email as in@in.com! From Friendster accounts to Cellphone purchases, I got emails from everywhere! On top of that, there was the regular SPAM which targeted my inbox. When there are so many disposable email address services on the Internet, why the hell do you guys have to type in a random email address when you register on a website?! So practically, the super cool looking email address that I had somewhow registered for myself was simply useless because of the sheer amount unsolicited messages that it received with each passing day.

The account kept lying unused for about a fortnight after which again I tried to login. It failed. I tried again. It failed again. I logged into the other 2 letter and 3 letter accounts that I had registered along with in@in.com I successfully logged into each of them. So it was evident that the folks at In.com had found out about my successful circumvention of their registration restrictions and had disabled the email address : in@in.com.

The same day, I tried to see if the bug still existed in their software. It did. It was there for a few more weeks. This morning, when I checked, it was gone. They had patched their software. A bug, which should have not been there in the first place itself; a bug, that should have been found on the first day of the testing; a bug, which affected the most fundamental module of their software - the registration had been rectified after months and months of so-called testing.

So what have I learnt after all this? Well for starters, the other email accounts I had grabbed are still intact and functioning. Secondly, I should have sold off the email address to some fool while I had the chance (just kidding) ! Thirdly, the guys at Web18 need to employ some actual testers at their development centre itself. And lastly, the advertisments that they are currently running on their TV18 network make no sense at all.

And one more thing, the guys at in.com should give me the id back as a token of gratitude for not disclosing the bug until it was rectified (some might say I should have informed them myself). What would I do if I got in@in.com back? The answer is nothing until people start using their real email addresses or take some pain and use a disposable email service to register accounts on different websites accross the web.

Adios.

Closely on the heals of me.com, which is the official site for Apple’s MobileMe service, Web18, a venture of Network18 has launched in.com. in.com was rumoured to be bought by Web18 for a sum of 2 crores, which is equal to 20 million.

I happened to see the advertisement for in.com on tech2.com which is another website owned by Web18.

Now that I’m on the topic of the shortest email address, the shortest address that I have been able to find on the Internet is www.v.gg. That’s right, yourname@v.gg. It has a free as well as a premium version. The free version offers 25MB of storage. But “v.gg”, although two characters shorter than in.com, does not seem to be cool or hip. Furthermore, their interface is ancient offering just 25MB of email storage.

On the other hand, in.com offers us an AJAX-ified interface, with gmail style linked conversations and a sufficient 10GB of space. Since the service is new, you can easily grab a cool email address of your choice. I grabbed a couple just to reserve ;). For example, usernames like fcuk or kick (kick-in, get it?) are still available. The least number of letters allowed in a username is 4. So, counting the @ and the period, the shortest email one can grab is four+@+in+.+com = 12 letters. Not too shabby! Go grab yours!