pomz.newmail.ru was the page of the Pavlovo Experimental Mechanical Plant Open Joint-Stock Company (OAO "POMZ"), a supplier of food-industry equipment from the town of Pavlovo in Nizhny Novgorod Oblast[1]. The plant listed its address as 606130, Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, Pavlovo, Vokzalnaya St., 64, along with phone numbers under the local code (831-71) 6-33-52, 6-04-25, 6-38-33, and the Nizhny Novgorod Oblast code (271)[1]. The page was hosted on the free hosting service of the email provider newmail.ru rather than in the Nizhny Novgorod domain zone, but it was included in the nn.ru directory of the Nizhny Novgorod internet, in the "/rub/" section, described as "Equipment for the food industry." Web archive snapshots show the site existed from roughly 2001 to 2008.

The plant's catalog and contacts

The earliest surviving snapshot, dated March 1, 2001, presented OAO "POMZ" as a "specialized enterprise for the development and production of equipment for the processing industries," manufacturing "a diverse range of equipment for the production of sausage products," as the home page stated[1]. From the home page, links led to a "Product Catalog," a "Product Catalog with Photos," and a "Price List"[1]. The list of products on the page was long and varied: equipment for canned beef and poultry, for cold and hot fish smoking, for milk and butter processing, for dough preparation, coarse-grinding mills, mortar mixers of up to 100 liters, woodworking machines, retail kiosks with a floor area from 24 square meters, bus shelters, drinking-water tanks with electric heating, kitchen utensil sets, garage doors, sauna and bathhouse stoves, barbecue kits, and water-heating tanks of up to 10 cubic meters — as the home page stated[1]. Separately, the plant offered to manufacture equipment sets for sausage workshops with a capacity of "from 500 kg per shift" to individual order, with on-site commissioning and training of the customer's staff, and delivery by the plant's own transport or by rail[1]. Email addresses were also given: pomz@newmail.ru and pomz@www.com[1].

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

The site was known to the Nizhny Novgorod internet chiefly as an entry in the nn.ru directory, a typical directory of local sites from the early 2000s, alongside Counter.nn.ru, whose counter its owners, judging by the surviving data, never installed: it does not appear in the surviving rating samples. No votes for pomz.newmail.ru during the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day are recorded in our data either — this is an absence of data in the sample, not confirmation that the site had zero popularity among users of its time. For more on the place of such industry pages in the overall picture of that period, see the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating and the general article on the Nizhny Novgorod Internet.

How the site closed

The domain pomz.newmail.ru was not the plant's own address but a subdomain (or email address based on) the newmail.ru hosting service; the web archive records a redirect to newmail.ru as early as 2003. By 2008 the address no longer belonged to the plant: the last known snapshot, dated May 11, 2008, shows the page under the name "OOO SPANORD" — a set of random advertising keywords and links with no connection to the previous content, characteristic of domains seized for placing link spam[2]. The name on this snapshot itself repeats "OOO SPANORD" three times[2]. No later ownership of the address by another fixed entity appears in the available data: the last web archive snapshot relating to the substantive version of the plant's site is dated to the period before the address was seized for the spam page.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2001 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Snapshot, 2008 (archive)