I had an email address I got when I first got out of college. It started as a NetCom account which later was bought by MindSpring which in turn was bought by Earthlink. I long ago stopped getting internet service from them but ha paid for the email address because of Nostalgia and convenience (I had some accounts tied to it).
Little by little they raised the price of the account to the point where it was silly to keep it. I should have done it a while ago but today I finally canceled it. How old is your oldest email account and why do you still have it?
I have a couple of throwaway Yahoo email addresses that date to 1998 or 1999. There isn’t a way to get the actual date that I can find since I don’t tend to save old emails.
I’ve had the same email address since the early to mid aughts. I got tired of changing email addresses every time I changed ISP so I registered my own domain. I have had several email hosts over that time but the same address. Ended up hosting on gmail because they had much better spam filtering, but thinking of changing since they are getting a bit pricey (I had to move to a business account a few years back).
My oldest email is my hotmail account that I have since 1998, 28 years. I used to access it from gmail but that doesn’t seem to work any more so I just review every now and then and keep it as my microsoft account.
My main e-mail address has been in service since somewhere around 1997, I think. I still have it because I’ve had no real compelling reasons to change it. It’s free, the spam filtering is variably modestly adequate and it’s been reasonably minimally compromised ( definitely not completely uncompromised). I’ve generally not paid much attention or made much use of my various ISP accounts over the years.
I signed up for SBC-Yahoo DSL internet service in 2005, which got me both an @sbcglobal.net and an @yahoo.com email address. The interesting thing is that both email addresses were tied to the same account, so regardless of which one you used the email would go to the same inbox.
SBC became AT&T not long after I signed up. And at some point they cut ties with Yahoo. But for a long time the two email addresses remained linked. Until a few years ago when they finally separated them. Which was annoying because I considered the two email addresses interchangeable and would give out either one.
But, long story short, I still use the yahoo address, which I’ve had for 21 years.
My wife and I created a shared email right around when we got married in the mid-90s, so around 30+ years and still use it. I have a personal email since around 2003.
Our comcast email is now about 15 years old. But it’s free (I was able to keep it after I closed out my comcast TV service when we moved) and I see no reason to change it other than the massive amounts of spam that come into it. I also have a gmail account that serves no purpose other than to direct possible glurge to it. I purge it every once in awhile. I think I have a third (free) account somewhere, but can’t remember who it was with.
I believe my oldest email account is the one associated with my Apple ID. It predates the existence of Apple IDs by a number of years, and has the mac.com suffix, which nobody has been able to get for many years. It’s at least 25 years old.
I got it because my previous email account was going away; my first email account was through my local library, and I got it in the early 90s. When I first got it, I used to have to go to the library and log onto a computer with the Pine email client, which looked like this:
My library was ending that program, and I scrambled to get a replacement. At the time, I was working my first office IT job and was supporting mostly Macintosh computers (this was when the iMac was still very new) and I found that I could get an email address through Apple, and it was both free and had IMAP capabilities (which not every email service did back then; many were POP3 only).
I have since moved over to Gmail as my primary email account, but I still have my mac.com address and it’s still active (though I never give it out and pretty much the only email I receive on it is a rare bit of spam a few times a year).
I’ve got a couple of hotmail accounts and a yahoo account that I still use - close to 30 years on. Yahoo is pretty much family only and the hotmail is for when I have to give an email but I don’t want clutter elsewhere. My main account is at engineer.com (a mail.com account that I set up about 25-ish years ago) and that’s for important email, tho it’s lately being barraged with lots of political crap for some reason - I have no party affiliation, so it’s not that.
We have one that came with our ISP, back 3 owners ago, tho it still carries the old domain. I really need to transfer all the important things on that account to another, then close it down - it gets megatons of junk on a daily basis.
When I started dating my husband, I used my dad’s UW PINE account, which wasn’t being used for anything except testing, as this was in 1989, the same year PINE was born. I think I have some printouts.
Nowadays colleges and universities let you keep your college email address after graduating, but back then, no chance. Remember the days of send a letter to share your email address?
My oldest email address is my work address, which is just a bit over a quarter century. I got gmail in September 2004, invited by a friend.
I still have active Yahoo and Netscape emails that must be going on 30 years now. The Yahoo account I barley use, but it no longer receives any spam, so I might start using it again. I still actively use the Netscape account.
