SoftHome

I feel pity much for the striving email providers who still can keep up their service side by side with the giants like Gmail (still in beta !) and Yahoo in a market where big fishes usually swallow little ones.

One of these little fishes is SoftHome which was my preferred service for a long time despite of its naiive interface, the 6 MB inbox and its limited monthly bandwidth; that's because I'm relying on POP access in a time where SoftHome was supporting it while Yahoo considered it a means to make money and discontinued supporting it as a free service anymore.

Although I knew 2 years ago that SoftHome POP service became a paid service, I found myself able to access my email with Outlook as usual, so I thought it might be applicable for new registrations only and hence continued using my lovely account.

Recently when I once decided to use Gmail POP fetcher to access my SoftHome account from Gmail interface, it failed with an error message: only for pro accounts. I checked again with Outlook to find no errors.

Pro account? I asked myself and made sure that all configurations are the same for Google POP fetcher and Outlook Express. I thought it may be a problem with Google or Softhome, hence I contacted Softhome support first to receive the following reply after 2 weeks of my email:

We do feel the obligation to provide you with an explanation.  The advertising market dried up some time ago and we can no longer afford to shoulder the burden of a service without revenue.  Unfortunately, the lack of revenue for such a core service as POP hamstrings our ability to invest the time necessary to improve the free service.

We initially restricted POP/SMTP service to pro accounts two years ago. Since then, we have continued to provide that service for SoftHome Personal accounts residing in areas of the world where the banking system is lacking.  During that period we looked for a way for persons in those areas to easily and safely upgrade their personal accounts to pro.  We have not found such a way, so we are dropping all free POP/SMTP service.

For those of you who need POP service, Professional Email 15 is only US$15 per year.

"Oh, it was blocked because Gmail servers are in US, but now it is blocked for Egypt too!" I said!

I decided to say goodbye to SoftHome and congratulate its team that they can strive till now and struggle for not to be eaten! Although there are more modern ways for striving in this unfair competition!