Archiver
Veteran
Our first email address was the one we made when signing up for internet in 1997. It has the domain name of our ISP at the time, which changed when the ISP was bought by another company, but the email address remained the same. Mum still uses that email address, but I moved on to webmail with Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail. Our original email address would be at least 27 years old.
My first Hotmail email address must be about 26 years old, as I recall first using it in 1998. It has survived multiple jobs, girlfriends and house moves.
My oldest Yahoo address is coming up to 24 years old. It was created in October 2000.
Time flies.
My first Hotmail email address must be about 26 years old, as I recall first using it in 1998. It has survived multiple jobs, girlfriends and house moves.
My oldest Yahoo address is coming up to 24 years old. It was created in October 2000.
Time flies.
chuckroast
Well-known
My first email was:
x,y@compuserve.com, back when you logged into the system as as [x,y]
My second email was:
something!something!something!something!me in the old UUCP world
If memory serves, an acquaintance at the University Of Chicago set me up to route through their uucp infrastructure.
Eventually, that "bangist" form of email gave way to my current "domainist" email format: me@mydomain.com
Along the way, this led to a career in technology and networking and I became more familiar than I ever wanted to be with the Unix "sendmail" routing program. This was used to take email to originating on any kind of a computer system and get routed to any other. Reading its configuration files was like looking at cartoon cursing (these days, it's a lot easier with more modern tooling).
Ahhhh, memory lane. In a very few years I plan to retire and never much worry about any of this stuff ... well, at least I want to spend more time with my dear friends, Schneider, Wisner, Graflex, Mamiya, Nikon, and Leica ...
x,y@compuserve.com, back when you logged into the system as as [x,y]
My second email was:
something!something!something!something!me in the old UUCP world
If memory serves, an acquaintance at the University Of Chicago set me up to route through their uucp infrastructure.
Eventually, that "bangist" form of email gave way to my current "domainist" email format: me@mydomain.com
Along the way, this led to a career in technology and networking and I became more familiar than I ever wanted to be with the Unix "sendmail" routing program. This was used to take email to originating on any kind of a computer system and get routed to any other. Reading its configuration files was like looking at cartoon cursing (these days, it's a lot easier with more modern tooling).
Ahhhh, memory lane. In a very few years I plan to retire and never much worry about any of this stuff ... well, at least I want to spend more time with my dear friends, Schneider, Wisner, Graflex, Mamiya, Nikon, and Leica ...
AndersG
Well-known
My second email was d96andgi@dtek.chalmers.se when starting at the Chalmers University of Technology in Göteborg, Sweden. My first I don't remember, but I got it about one year earlier (1995) when signing up for my first internet connection at home.
bigeye
Well-known
Messaging account on Dockmaster/DARPANET. 1986?
David Murphy
Veteran
My oldest address was my first name plus the domain name of my then employer - it was a very, very early Internet email address (from circa 1994). It was eventually taken away as the domain went away. As the Internet and Web matured, some websites refused to accept that email address legitimate because, apparently, it was considered too simple to be legitimate!
titrisol
Bottom Feeder
Mine was in ecua.net.ec sometime in 92-93
Then i had a yahoo and theglobe accounts
Then i had a yahoo and theglobe accounts
willie_901
Veteran
A very really GMAIL account just six capital letters before @gmail.com. Almost as old is a Yahoo mail address which is also just six capital letters before @yahoo.com
willie_901
Veteran
friedhans
Newbie
I made a Yahoo account for Friendster, but that's as early as I get when it comes to emails.
chuckroast
Well-known
I had an original Compuserve account in the format XXXXX,XXXX
Then I had a source routed UUCP email address in the form !something!something!something!something!me
For those who don't know what those two things are ... you missed all the fun.
Then I had a source routed UUCP email address in the form !something!something!something!something!me
For those who don't know what those two things are ... you missed all the fun.
Last edited:
Archiver
Veteran
I clearly missed all the fun! Although I think we had sporadic internet access from at least about 1991 (thanks, Dad!) I never used it until '97, when we signed up for an internet plan.
Richard G
Veteran
I could have retained my first email address from 1997, and ozeimail.net.au address. I switched to mac.com I still hear that dial up connection in my head as one of the most exciting things I ever heard. My daughter used to emulate it running down the hall aged 4. I saw someone the other day claim they missed dial up!
DownUnder
Nikon Nomad
I got into email in 1997. A colleague (and fellow author), the late Frank Bren who many Australians may remember on TV, introduced me to Hotmail and kindly set up my first address. I have it written down somewhere, but for reasons I've long ago forgotten it shut down on me about 2004. I still had files on it I would like to have. Alas, those are surely gone to some place in the universe, maybe to be retrieved by Martians or Venutians or some other life form in the far-flung outer universe. My loss, their gain.
In 2004 Frank Bren (then in Hong Kong for an extended stay) was hacked by shysters in the Philippines who got into his Hotmail and took his addresses and sent everyone an email citing an "emergency" and asking for urgent money. We all knew he wasn't in Manila so AFAIK nobody bit the hook. This was very upsetting to him as he had to email everyone to say he was alive and well and not bankrupt in Manila or Cebu. In some ways he never fully recovered from this experience, and I can understand it, he had hundreds of names on his address list.
I was then with Yahoo and I too had similar problems. There were two hacking attempts, fortunately without any loss to me, I've long kept a separate address only for my banking emails. Nobody at Yahoo was in the least interested in assisting, so we gave up on them. I closed my two Y addresses and returned to Hotmail and I've stayed there since. It's a tad 'academic' for many, but the simplicity of its operation suits me. I'm definitely a KISS
type.
Now retired, I make more use of emails than I do of my mobile phone. Here in Indonesia my home internet is unlimited and costs a whopping
$30 a month. Someone smarter than me connected my Australian phone to my internet. Good one.
Interesting to note a friend in Melbourne who recently passed away kept his one and only email address from 1995 or 1996. He was with AAPT - does anyone in Australia still remember them? - and he stayed with that provider from day one. For reasons unknown AAPT ceased billing him for the service about a decade ago - maybe in recognition of his being their oldest customer, ha! - so he had years of free internet.
Gee, golly, gosh, that is ANCIENT! How many of you were there on that site back then? My guess is about six.
It must have been a lot like trying to make a phone call on a party line in the 1950s...
I was working on computers for clients who had some sort of early online capacity, in the early 1980s. But I don't recall anyone using it for external emails. Internal company matters, yes. Like a chat box. I had very limited computer/internet skills (it took me at least two years to stop putting manual returns at the end of every line in letters, reports etc written on an IBM PC) but many executives would call on me to delete their 'sensitive' emails as they didn't know how to do it. I learned many corporate secrets from this small chore.
As an aside thought, I find it amazing (and amusing) that a majority of people on our planet have no idea what life was like before Facebook.
In 2004 Frank Bren (then in Hong Kong for an extended stay) was hacked by shysters in the Philippines who got into his Hotmail and took his addresses and sent everyone an email citing an "emergency" and asking for urgent money. We all knew he wasn't in Manila so AFAIK nobody bit the hook. This was very upsetting to him as he had to email everyone to say he was alive and well and not bankrupt in Manila or Cebu. In some ways he never fully recovered from this experience, and I can understand it, he had hundreds of names on his address list.
I was then with Yahoo and I too had similar problems. There were two hacking attempts, fortunately without any loss to me, I've long kept a separate address only for my banking emails. Nobody at Yahoo was in the least interested in assisting, so we gave up on them. I closed my two Y addresses and returned to Hotmail and I've stayed there since. It's a tad 'academic' for many, but the simplicity of its operation suits me. I'm definitely a KISS
type.Now retired, I make more use of emails than I do of my mobile phone. Here in Indonesia my home internet is unlimited and costs a whopping
$30 a month. Someone smarter than me connected my Australian phone to my internet. Good one.
Interesting to note a friend in Melbourne who recently passed away kept his one and only email address from 1995 or 1996. He was with AAPT - does anyone in Australia still remember them? - and he stayed with that provider from day one. For reasons unknown AAPT ceased billing him for the service about a decade ago - maybe in recognition of his being their oldest customer, ha! - so he had years of free internet.
Gee, golly, gosh, that is ANCIENT! How many of you were there on that site back then? My guess is about six.
It must have been a lot like trying to make a phone call on a party line in the 1950s...
I was working on computers for clients who had some sort of early online capacity, in the early 1980s. But I don't recall anyone using it for external emails. Internal company matters, yes. Like a chat box. I had very limited computer/internet skills (it took me at least two years to stop putting manual returns at the end of every line in letters, reports etc written on an IBM PC) but many executives would call on me to delete their 'sensitive' emails as they didn't know how to do it. I learned many corporate secrets from this small chore.
As an aside thought, I find it amazing (and amusing) that a majority of people on our planet have no idea what life was like before Facebook.
Last edited:
raydm6
Yay! Cameras! 🙈🙉🙊┌( ಠ_ಠ)┘ [◉"]
1993.
I was working for an MIT-based supercomputer start-up - Thinking Machines Corporation in Cambridge. I worked on the CM-5.
I was working for an MIT-based supercomputer start-up - Thinking Machines Corporation in Cambridge. I worked on the CM-5.
Archiver
Veteran
Mum still has her ozemail address from 97, which we used for almost everything back before webmail was a thing. Hotmail came later, then Yahoo in 2000. My first Yahoo email address turns 24 in October. I just checked my emails and the first Yahoo email I ever sent was still there.
That pa-ping pa-ping screee sound of dial up was always exciting, you knew you were connecting to a whole new world.
Sadly, I lost a couple of email addresses from mail.com through disuse, they would have been even older than my Yahoo, had I kept them up. Mail.com gave you email addresses from domains like photographer.net or musician.org, which was fun. Looks like they still do!
With the increased issues with corporate spying on email contents, we're thinking about moving to something like Protonmail. I'm already starting to ditch SMS for anything but the most basic messages, and moving to end-to-end encrypted chat programs for everything else.
ChrisPlatt
Thread Killer
I'll be the first to admit starting off with an AOL email address.
I still check it periodically to delete all the spam.
Chris
I still check it periodically to delete all the spam.
Chris
Archiver
Veteran
@ChrisPlatt I knew a lot of people with AOL addresses, haha. As noted, my first webmail address was with Hotmail, and that got spam like nothing else. It still does, amusingly, although not in the Inbox.
@DownUnder Yes, I remember AAPT. It's nuts that they stopped billing your (sadly passed) friend for internet over a decade ago! Who could forget their ads with the annoying earworm at the end.
Ay! Ay!
Ay Ay Pee!
Ay Ay Pee Tee!
Smart Chat!
@DownUnder Yes, I remember AAPT. It's nuts that they stopped billing your (sadly passed) friend for internet over a decade ago! Who could forget their ads with the annoying earworm at the end.
Ay! Ay!
Ay Ay Pee!
Ay Ay Pee Tee!
Smart Chat!