Tell me about your first email address
Ben Halpern
・1 min read
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....
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Inspired by this tweet....
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.
Does your own domain name count?
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.
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.
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.
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. :)
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. 😊
Innovations like Navigator's <BLINK> tag?
Xmodem sucked. Zmodem (or Kermit, even) were the shiznit!
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.
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
screenwas so nice, given how slow transfers were: nothing like firing upscreen, starting up a auto-retrying transfer, detach and log out ...come back a day or so later to the finished transfer).kidmagineeditoron 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:
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
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.
My mom is still Very Online, come to think of it.
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
You're posting your email that you use for official government communication...? 😐
Ya ... because I hardly check it . only once in every quarter ending o :). Anyway, my Gmail is also available in every article.
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.
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
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. 🎉
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)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".
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.
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 😆
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. 😁
I think my first email was actually associated with my first website, a .tk domain.
Then I got hotmail, then moved to yahoo.ca, then used my university email for a while (mta.ca) then actually got gmail so I could use Google+, and that’s been my personal address ever since.
I had so many .tk domains.
😄
If your first email address is on your domain, you are an alien.
In was in the middle of the 90:s, I was about 30 years old and a friend referred med to a Swedish, unix based hosting called Algonet. They included an email address, a public_html directory with ability to run CGI scripts. Connection was made by a phone modem (high phone bills!) and it was like magic when my home computer accessed the whole internet. I made a script for my computer to call Algonet at nights for example to fetch emails, when the rate was lower.
I still use some of the things I learned at Algonet. Today, I run my own Linux server as a VPS and I still have a public_html directory for publishing some experimental stuff. I see on the bill that 4 MB quota was included. A huge space!
My very first email address was made by my step father at the time, I was 12 years old I think. And it was an
@msn.com, yes these existed 😅I still have it but don't use it anymore, I keep it if case I need to log back into some old platform again (that I can't remember that I joined) and need to do a password reset or change email verification.
Other than that I don't use it anymore, it gets bombed with spam mails everyday now. I switched to gmail a long time ago and recently also started using my own mail domain.
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).
My first one was probably on a local ISP, probably 16 or 17. My first free email was on angelfire dot com. Which is not a thing anymore. I got on gmail back when it was invite only (but not particularly hard to get an invite).
I'd actually love to get off of gmail now. But the more privacy-focused alternatives (hosted in countries with strong privacy protections) are still too hard to deal with. So I'm still looking for the alternative to present itself. The straw for me was when I looked at the data Google kept on me. And I noticed some trips and travel itineraries that I did not book through Google and I could not delete. The reason is because they scraped it from gmail emails. To delete the info they collected on me, I would have to delete the emails themselves.
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.
Somewhere around 2011 was when I made one.
it was for a Youtube Channel
SSSidGGG
lost the email as i lost the number it was associated with.
sidgrocks@gmail.com
Have a similar one right now
sidgroks@gmail.com
Also have a business mail that I use for official stuff.
ahoy@barelyhuman.dev
Something
@aol.com,@hotmail.comand then@yahoo.com. Made the switch to@gmail.comin high school and haven't looked back.Don't remember the whole address, but my first email was probably sometime during middle school when AOL had those free trial disks.
age 13
Yahoo!
nightwalker<some numbers><my initials>@yahoo.comI was really into vampires as a teen and "night walker" was what I thought cool was at the time.
I remember when I was a bit older I had to call our ISP at one point when our dial-up wasn't working and had to read my email aloud to someone. "So...you take walks at night?" I'm cringing to this day.
I got my boring "grown up" gmail address back when you had to get an invite, circa 2005 (age 17 at the time).
I was around 11 and it was a hotmail address my dad made for me. I felt really cool having an email address, but the problem was that I was the only one in my friend group who did. So I had no one to send mail to. Did not use it for 2 years and then the internet went big around here and everyone got an email address.
I was 25 I think.
The provider was micronet.fr. I was on Windows 3.1 I think.
helary@micronet.fr
The owner of my favorite bookstore had recently jumped on the modem/copper lines internet bandwagon and he told me "just get yourself a modem and see!" At the time university did not have mails for all the undergrads (it was 94-95 ?) so I had to get one from a private provider.
The domain now belongs to something else altogether.
But I did find a trace of that mail, a message sent in July 96 to the now defunct "bad subjects" list I think:
writing.upenn.edu/epc/poetics/arch...
The second one I had was helary@eskimo.com from a remote provider in the US because internet was very expensive in Japan at the time (97). The provider still exists, and the site looks a lot like what it was then. I accessed it through telnet but could not figure any interesting thing to do there.
I can see thanks to Google that I wrote more on public lists at the time. I still remember my woes trying to configure X on a Thinkpad on which I had installed Debian (that was around 97-00) at the time UTF-8 was not widely used so I had duplicated applications on my system, one to support Japanese encoding and the other to support French encoding. Because I could not configure X I read my mail in mutt after filtering it with procmail, etc...
I was 10 year old and it was on msn.(rest in piece 🙏🏻)
My mouse was broken but I don't know why I was done of waiting my aunt to create me an account. So I created mine one day by spamming the Tab key of my keyboard 😂👌🏻
The reason ? Just to wizz some people on msn 😂
horza07@hotmail.com because I played theme park as a kid! For a $50,000 start, you made a new park with your nickname "HORZA". It meant that my brother knew I was cheating because of my name, so I made it my name for tons of games after that! Registered in 1998, I wanted horza@hotmail.com and it suggested 07, presumably because 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, and 06, were taken!
The 90s were a fun strange time.
To the best of my recollection my first email address was on a Model 204 mainframe system in the mid-'80s -- everyone in the company had one. Could not tell you what the address was to save my life 😀
Might have had an Internet email in late '88, but definitely got one in '89 when I started at Sun. At the time mail was delivered directly from workstation to workstation, so you needed to know the name of the computer of the person you wanted to reach, e.g.
hassan@ripple(internally) orhassan@ripple.sun.comexternally. UUCP-style addresses also worked, socom!sun!ripple!hassan(IIRC). Good times 😀89 or 90 was around the time all the interns I was IRC'ing with were mailing from @eng.sun.com. They'd get email faster if you mailed to their workstations' FQDNs, though.
Hmm.
1993, my exciting university times, using diskless workstations or ancient-even-by-then dumb terminals and a PAD.
ssusncla was my username at university. "SSU" was the code for Computer Science. Half my coursemates' usernames started with that and half with "SHU" which was the code for Cybernetics or Engineering, not sure which. The split seemed arbitrary since we were all doing the same degrees.
"SNCLA" was a mangling of my name to fit in the remaining 5 characters, making 8 in total.
Along with the account came email. I'd been used to local LAN mail before, but hadn't quite twigged that this one let you mail other universities... let alone other random organisations around the world.
I was 10 years old. I had just received my first computer. It was a yahoo account. it was "phatboii123@yahoo.com". the "phatboii" is supposed to sound like "fat boy" since I was a chubby kid back then.
I was 15, my brother and I were told to create our own email address so we could speak with our relatives in the US. My brother created his on hotmail, I used yahoo. My brothers' was something like
jaime_neutronat hotmail and mine was something likeicen015at yahoo. Recently I checked my email and it still works with a gazillion spam emails lolI think I was 19 or 20, and it was a bbs with some internet access called mindvox.
The email was dan1mal@mindvox.com. I had another one right after at escape.com that I really liked, it was dreamer@escape.com. The email kind of came with the system back then, I didnt really have people to email. It was more bulletin board based (thus, BBS) and I hardly remember sending any email except to sysadmin.
I love the internet. Even as commercial as its gotten, its just changed our world so much for the better. That and higher bandwidth, 1200 baud modems were no fun.
mcginnis01@earthlink.net. Pretty self explanatory.
I was around 10 at the time. My family had started homeschooling and my dad thought it would be a good idea to set one up on my tiny homeschooling laptop.
My first need for an email account was when I was a teenager and needed to sign up for msn messenger I think
I tried using just “filipe” and it was taken, which made me sad so I looked at the first thing in front of me, which was a Samsung Syncmaster 757DFX monitor and that’s how “filipe_dfx@domain.com” became my first email
I think if I knew how to speak English at the time I would have gone with syncmaster instead lol
emericaskater on Yahoo
I believe I was in middle school and needed an email account for MySpace and AIM lol.
I loved skateboarding growing up and Emerica was one of the popular brands at the time.
Around 1988, in college. Don't remember it, but it was approximately my name at-cooper.edu -- I only used it to email other students or professors and then to post to newsgroups. In 1992, I got my first job and they had some insane email address (many special characters) from their internet provider (we didn't have a domain) -- around 1995/96, that became something normal with a company domain.
Here is a relevant Dilbert from that era that exactly described my situation: dilbert.com/strip/1996-10-22
God, this brings me back. I was a PC support technician, and we were still running Windows 3.1! I had a copy of AOL and created an ID. Little did I know at the time that would also be my first email address. I was still in college, so I must have been 20 or 21
I was curious with AOL, had my modem for old BBS boards, and eventually found the Internet through college and work. From there, I was hooked. Soon after I was using Mosaic and Netscape, and downloading news groups.
I still have that AOL address to this day.
I started my comp sci degree in 1993, so I must have been 20 years old at that time. I knew about "The Internet" through a friend whose father taught at UBC, and knew that I wanted an account on the university's system, and during the freshman orientation, I asked the guy showing us around campus about that. As new students, we weren't going to get an account in the computer science department's system for another two years, but the university had a pool of VT100 terminals connected to some Linux PCs that were able to get online, and that's where I got my first account and email address: q09960@pbhrzx.uni-paderborn.de - that's got part of my student id and the name of one of the Linux PCs in there. That finally let me get in touch my Canadian friend through his dad's UBC address. Email software choices at the time were pine and elm, just like your browser choices were gopher and gopher.
A year later I had a student job writing code for a PhD candidate, and got a "proper" account in the computer department, working on Sun workstations instead of the old VT100 terminals. NCSA mosaic had caused gopher to be replaced with HTTP, and there was even an upstart company named Netscape that made a browser with email functionality. Never looked back at pine and elm.
First email from russian mail.ru Still alive.
This portal I got from science magazine article about internet. It was 2002 year.
Full email float45@mail.ru
float is double mention - is surname translation also is data type programming languages
45 is year of the Victory because I have interested in the history
I'm 34 years old
I was 15 or 16 at the time (1999/2000). We didn't have a computer at home so I would go to the library at school and check my email which mostly consisted of pointless newsletters I signed up for.
The address was jazzgirltrump@hotmail.com (trump being short for trumpet :) )
I also used it for MSN messenger when we finally got a computer at home.
I was 24 in 1993 and it was an account with a Boston area ISP. My email address was cjwoods@world.std.com. I got an email address by default when I subscribed to the ISP's internet access service (dialup unix shell accounts). I bounced between pine and elm for email clients. I had been using (and running) BBS's for a few years by then and started hearing about the Internet in the early 90's, and began accessing it through somewhat questionable means for a couple of years and learned a lot about unix on Ultrix running on some VaxStations in a university, and then SunOS 4.1.3 on Solbourne Sun clone hardware at The World. It was a heady time and I spent endless hours on Usenet news groups, and tinkering with programming languages and learning about TCP/IP networking an unix internals.
I often miss those days.
My first email was Hotmail and it was the union of both my name and last name. I created it to play Neopets and games like those, so I should've been around 10-11 years old. I had to change it because some guy showed me something NASTY in a messenger chat and I, an innocent panda, had no idea what he was showing me, so I called my mom all terrified 'cause WTH, she looked at the nasty (he was still doing it!) and quickly helped me create a new email. She later sat down with me to talk about strangers on the internet.
I ended up having around 4 different emails between Gmail and Hotmail and I currently use 2 of those and a german guy is using one of them by accident... I worry for the guy 'cause he currently signed me up by accident to a "How to feel good during the COVID-19 crisis" newsletter. I hope he's better!
;W;
I was... maybe 12? I thing it was bol...
I don't remember why but I fancied myself a poet back them I guess, because it was patypoetisa@bol.com , poetisa meaning female poet in Portuguese.
I had totally forgot about that until now xD
I never really used it because I had no access to computers back them.
How old were you?
11 (2001)
What platform was it?
MSN Messenger (still miss that service...) /Hotmail
What was the whole address if you're willing to share?
wes_1990 at msn.com
How/why did you get on email in the first place?
MSN Messenger
And anything else you'd like to add to your story....
With the release of Windows Vista i've switched to wes [at] vista.aero
My first email address was @gmail.com back when I was around 9 or 10. It also was the email I used for my first ever YT channel. My current email is @kaix.live with Zoho Mail, something I started using a year ago using my old domains my favorite of which was @nettly.me and @novuspax.net (I don't use either of them, and I think I even sold Novuspax.net). I never used Yahoo, and had one @aol.com email back when I was 13 for Tumblr.
My first email address was super embarrassing. I'm not gonna share it because I still use it 😶I created it for a project I had to do in 6th grade. We had to make some sort of Google website I think. I was 11 and it was a Google email account. I didn't have a cell phone at the time so my teacher had to use her phone to authenticate my account😭I still use it now because that really wasn't that long ago lol. I never say it out loud though because it's just that embarrassing.
Fun! I had an Hotmail account and was a big Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan. Must have been 13 of 14 yo. It was themagicgal@... I did try to get in there a few years ago. But was not successful. Totally forgot the password and any of the security questions.
Got a @gmail.com with my real name now, and have had that for a while. Apparently I was the first person with my name to get a Gmail address 🤗 so no numbers or other signs added.
I also have an email address from my website. But that one I just use as an alias to go to my Gmail.
My first one was a hotmail.com address. Didn't use it much for anything else than logging in to the MSN Messenger which by the way is still the real Messenger even after its death so you all Facebook Messenger kids can go home.
I was 14, It was around 2007
Platform was the one and only Yahoo!
Email ID was - suburuworld 😂
The reason was to have something digital 😎
The username was inspired by a Scientist's name in Cadbury Gems commercial advertisement. Since during my school days I aspired to become a scientist 😂
I was 14 it was 2000. I used hotmail since everyone else was using it. I am not going to share it in case someone else has it. Back then if you are inactive for 30 days, it gets deleted and my family couldn't afford the internet for months at one point.
Random question: does anybody remember the social media site Bolt? I was all about that back in the day.