Outblaze.net gone

[King Of Email]

Outblaze.net, Outblaze.com's original free signature in house email service is gone. While it was only 10MB, (later 20) it had 30MB of convenient and stable inbox file storage, until now that is. I used Outblaze.net free email for this purpose and because it had no ads. With this gone, there seem to be no more Outblaze based free email services left as they slowly went out of business but at different times. This service seemed like it would stay afloat as a legacy thing, but no luck. Unfortunately, if anyone had any email, pictures, or documents in any of these accounts they are also gone as Outblaze never bothered to inform any of their users that they were shutting down all accounts, not just some. A poor end to a poorly run service.

[pr472]

It seems that outblaze was around forever. I think one of my very first web-based email accounts was with them - maybe 15 years ago ?

[ShameOnOutblaze]

I'm disappointed by what Outblaze has done as well. They closed the service without warning. It started slowly back in December when after logging in, a bug caused all links to redirect you to sanriotown.com, which I guess is owned by Outblaze. Then webmail worked fine for a few weeks after that. Finally in January, any attempts to login would fail. Now the domain outblaze.net doesn't even load.

I had about 8 or 9 years worth of emails on there, on multiple accounts. Lots of personal stuff, photos, account info, etc. I have friends and family in the same predicament.

Any attempts to contact support failed miserably. Outblaze.net doesn't have it's own support staff. Multiple emails to Outblaze.com's support were ignored. Even simple requests to get contact info for outblaze.net were ignored or dismissed.

This is a copy of the email I received from Selene Santos of Outblaze.com after several weeks of trying to reach them:

----------------------------------
"Dear Member,

We are not the support group of outblaze.net.

Regards,
Outblaze.com Support Group"
----------------------------------

That's all they wrote. A couple of letters to founder and CEO Yat Siu also received no response. Nobody seems to have any accountability at this company and I'm embarrassed to have used them and referred them in the past.

[Killer]

If it is a free service, I don't think they will bother.

[Nikolaos]

Interesting. They were one of the rare few I never did get an account with.

Found this little note on a page on the outblaze.com site:

In 2009, in order to focus on gaming and multimedia, Outblaze sold its email business to IBM, who turned it into a cloud computing messaging research lab and used Outblaze technology to build new IBM services.

So perhaps IBM is the one at fault for the shoddy treatment of outblaze mail users?

[OneTrickPony]

Originally Posted by King Of Email

With this gone, there seem to be no more Outblaze based free email services left

There is at least one I know of. HelloKitty.com still uses Outblaze xD
So there's still an option. Nyan!

[King Of Email]

Originally Posted by OneTrickPony

There is at least one I know of. HelloKitty.com still uses Outblaze xD
So there's still an option. Nyan!

I did realize this because I, your humble King, have an account at Hello Kitty believe it or not. Unfortunately, all the utilities I used Hello Kitty for, especially the free file storage (250 MB) is now gone along with the files I had stored there. As for ownership, Outblaze of Hong Kong still owns the domain until 2014 probably because of the popularity and legacy of the Hello Kitty brand which is linked to many commercial products and is of Asian (Japanese) origin.