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Ben Halpern
Ben Halpern

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Tell me about your first email address

How old were you?

What platform was it?

What was the whole address if you're willing to share?

How/why did you get on email in the first place?

And anything else you'd like to add to your story....

Top comments (114)

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Ben Halpern

Inspired by this tweet....

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Pacharapol Withayasakpunt • Edited

My @msn.com (my first) is still alive. Although I also link Microsoft account to GMail.

My current email is same as my first, but @gmail.com.

I also have @ymail.com, but it is practically dead.

I am 29. First email was probably 7-8.

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Waylon Walker

Does your own domain name count?

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Ben Halpern

I don't share the sentiment, but based on the above logic... Absolutely.

TBH I think there's an certain creepiness in general society associated with understanding and using tech. It's not a good thing, but I think it's a thing.

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ferricoxide profile image
Thomas H Jones II

I guess being over thirty means that having a non-Gmail primary email address doesn't automatically make me a serial killer. Hell, my email address is rolling up on being 30yo (seriously: I registered my domain back on September 27th,1995).

The only reason I'm able to have such an old email address and not have an inbox uselessly-full of spam is that my anti-spam setup is far more aggressive than Google's.

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Jason C. McDonald • Edited

kidmagineeditor on gmail. It's got a lot of history behind it...

When I was a kid, I actually ran a children's website called Kidmagine. It was something of an outlet for my own creativity, and I hoped to showcase that of other kids. What I did get to do was actually interview children's authors — thanks to my own site being hosted by my mother's writing community, the Dancing Word Writer's Network. My favorite part was also "publishing" my own imaginary newspaper, the Sunset Gazette, on the website.

(The rendering is a little messed up on the Archive.org snapshots, but you can get the idea of what my web design skills were back then. Another version of the homepage is here.)

Kidmagine eventually became the seed for MousePaw Media. In fact, you'll notice mentions of a game called "Remmie and the Lab Rats" in places! That became the concept for "Operation SpyRat", the game I've spent the past ten years trying to construct the tools I need to build. My screenname, CodeMouse92, also originated from these games.

"Remmie and the Lab Rats" was actually a practical joke on some IRC friends when I was a kid (they were college students). Hokey as they were, they were a lot of fun to build, and it really got me interested in game design. You can watch playthroughs of my original Remmie and the Lab Rats games on YouTube, in fact:

Remmie and the Lab Rats 1: Rat Rescue
Remmie and the Lab Rats 2: The Search for Remmie
Remmie and the Lab Rats 3: Escape from Grentag Mountain

The first remake was the sort of "proof-of-concept" for what would become MousePaw Media today. You can watch it here:

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jess unrein

I was pianokeygirl@aol.com when I was 7 or 8 years old. It’s the login for my old Neopets account and I’m so sad that I’m locked out of that account forever now. I got email because my mom was Very Online in the 90s and thought it was a good idea.

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jess unrein

My mom is still Very Online, come to think of it.

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manish srivastava

I was 18 in 2002 Yahoo email.
I still use it but for govt official correspondence.

Neelabh_srivastava@yahoo.com

It was made by my friend in my college computer lab 😁 .

I remember , next day I tried to open it in a cyber cafe.... but was totally blank where to sign in... Hahaha...

My friend hacked my email many times ... I was surprised that he knew so much about hacking.

Only after two years I discovered that he doesn't know thing about hacking... he only remember my all secrets to email.

123-greetings ... gif greetings we used to send... the only purpose of emails before Facebook

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Elliot Derhay

You're posting your email that you use for official government communication...? 😐

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manish srivastava

Ya ... because I hardly check it . only once in every quarter ending o :). Anyway, my Gmail is also available in every article.

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Robin Kretzschmar • Edited

I'm 28 right now (apparently a serial killer according to the tweet 😅).
My first E-Mail address was a t-online address because that was the go-to provider at the time my parents got their first ISP contract at home. The whole family had to choose an email address so everyone had 3 days to come up with a nickname and register it.

During my early days of childhoof back when I couldn't pronounce my name "Robin", I used to introduce my self as bimpfampf. Don't ask why, no one expect myself could pronounce that word but until the age of 4, I told everyone that this was my name 😂

This mail lived on until I started my training at the age of 16 and my mentor told me I must create a business suitable address right now! So we created one with my full name and that was the day I started to abandon the old one... 👻

Fun fact: no one bat an eye on the name for this long.

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Ken Bellows

My first email address was @yahoo.com, made during 6th grade computer class in 2001 so I could log into Neopets, and based on a Pokemon. I won't share it here just because I still use the same username, albeit @gmail.com since high school

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Aaron Schlesinger

AOL! I was something like 13 or so. I don't remember the whole thing, but it started with aschlesinger. I got into email because why not, it came on a CD!

Then I discovered AIM and it didn't matter anymore. Then Hotmail, then Gmail. I'm using Fastmail now, but I admire Gmail a lot. It seems like the platform has been 5+ years ahead on features and just raw technology (speed etc...)

Outlook might be catching up these days on some of the AI stuff though

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Paula Gearon • Edited

21

Unix. I don’t know what type.

s2302656@student.uq.edu.au

I had to write a letter to the head of the EE department to justify why having access to the internet would be important for me. Either I made a good argument, or else the letter didn’t actually matter 🙂 (pretty sure my argument wasn’t that great).

I could get onto the system via telnet from one of several machines around campus. The programs they told us about on the system included: email, ftp, gopher, lynx, xmodem (for those who could dial in), finger, irc.
I also got access to the modem bank, so I started saving for a modem. Meanwhile, I had a job at an office that had a modem. This let me use NCSA Mosaic, and also copy the files I’d downloaded from ftp servers onto a floppy.

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Benjamin Leopold

Wow, back when Mosaic was the lone wolf howling somewhere in the direction of the moon. Though really as a brilliant creation and proof-of-concept that led to more amazing innovations. The happy days. :)

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Thomas H Jones II

Innovations like Navigator's <BLINK> tag?

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Paula Gearon

Mosaic was it for a little bit, but it wasn't long before Netscape Navigator and HotJava came out. OK, so no one actually used HotJava, but it's a fun footnote. 😊

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Thomas H Jones II

Xmodem sucked. Zmodem (or Kermit, even) were the shiznit!

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Paula Gearon

zmodem came in soon after, and I always preferred it! Restarting failed transfers was amazing. I did try Kermit a couple of times (oh, and ymodem), but zmodem was the way to go.

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Thomas H Jones II

Yeah. Ymodem was just a very short way-station between the frustrations of xmodem and zmodem.

Given how flaky NSFnet was at the time, zmodem was a sanity-saver (and screen was so nice, given how slow transfers were: nothing like firing up screen, starting up a auto-retrying transfer, detach and log out ...come back a day or so later to the finished transfer).

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Stephanie Handsteiner

My very first mail address was one of the 5 addresses we got from the ISP, I was like 8 or 9 years old, when I got that. I don't even know what name I used. 🤔

My first serious one was an @hotmail address, I mostly used it to log into MSN Messenger, though. Then, when google launched gmail I registered one of those, still use that today. 😁

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Tulsi Prasad

Haha, this is funny!

I was young and I lived with my uncle for a long time, he was into computers so he made me one although I was in grade 3 and I didn't use it until my 6th grade. It was on @yahoo, later I changed it to Gmail.

The funny part is, almost for a year I was typing my email in the URL bar and always getting something else. and I didn't know it had a password coz I wasn't said so! 🙈 I figured it all out when I made one myself 3 years later. 😅 I still don't know what my password was, I forgot my email too 😆

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Arit Developer

I wouldn't say this was my first-ever email address, but it is the one I first remember 😄

It was trpclldy@yahoo.com 😣

I was in my late teens.

I got the email for use with GeoCities and MySpace accounts. 🎉

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Carlos Chacin ☕👽

I'm 38 yo, my first email was @hotmail, my wife was my girlfriend at that time created the account for me when I started computer science because I didn't know how to do it (I've never touched a computer before)

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Dave Jacoby

I was 18 years old, and the platform was MUSIC, or Multi User System for Interactive Computing, on BITNET, which meant Because It's Time. The various networks were connecting, but they weren't congealed into The Internet yet. I'm not willing to share the whole, but it was @sdsumus.bitnet, and we had to use bang paths in order to send mail to "real" addresses, so it was something like @sdsumus.bitnet!utoronto.edu. (Or something like that. It was decades ago.)

I didn't have any computing courses that used this; I asked for it, I got it, I joined email lists. Some of which back-ended onto NetNews, so I got to see Serdar Argic deny the the Armenian Genocide whenever you did did something like suggest that "That movie was a real TURKEY".

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Thomas H Jones II • Edited

BITNET was so great for sending spoofed emails. Route your email through the right gateways and totally wash away your originating email address (though, the recipient ended up seeing an email address that looked like ${SECOND_TO_LAST_GATEWAY_NAME}@${LAST_GATEWAY_NAME} (Trinity University's was great for source-washing).

Always hated UUCP mail. Could take weeks for a message to transit the full path (and it was always a challenge to figure out the fastest bang-path to your recipient). Still: was better than trying to exchange email with FidoNet users.

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Rob Kendal {{☕}}

Ahh mine was in the good old days of Hotmail...

'Twas bpk68@hotmail.co.uk.

Fairly simple to explain:

The 'bpk' part is my initials (Bob is short for Robert, P is my middle initial, and unsurprisingly K for Kendal). The '68' part would have been '69' because, well, '69', but 16 year old me thought that was a little on the nose (ahem, that's what she said).

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Hadrian Hughes

hadrian@inkstickstudio.com

I was 12 and I spent my pocket money on a domain and cPanel hosting so I could mess around with Dreamweaver and upload my little Flash games.

I ended up using the email address as the parental controls email on my World of Warcraft account, and then the hosting ran out and I lost access to my account controls forever.