Having a backbone account made this so much easier for people to reach me. They would send me messages and then I could respond without having to do the research.
I am still using an email account from 1999. I must have gotten my first email address in about 1995 while in the Army.
I got an email address from my university in 1997. I used that as my main email address forever because it was much more professional than my Gmail address. They just shut the alumni email program down this year…probably because they switched to a cloud service that charged them by the email address.
Last year I started trying to transition everything over to my gmail but I’m sure I missed some things. Hope it doesn’t come to bite me in the ass.
I think my mom’s email address is hella old. It’s @roadrunner.com. If she ever cancels Spectrum she’s going to have to learn a whole new email system.
That’s what keeps a lot of elderly people on overpriced legacy systems. They are afraid to change from something that they know.
My oldest email accounts (gmail, hotmail) only date back to 2006 because that’s the first time I started paying for home internet. Before that, my email addresses were university accounts (~1993 to 2000) or work (~1998 to 2005).
Did you not have internet connectivity at home until you were 40+ years old in 2006?
Maybe because I was working in the telecommunications & networking sector in the 1990s, but this seems strange. Were you using something like dial-up on a phone line or ISDN at home and connecting via work intranet to the internet?
By around 2002 email was the way I communicated with most people outside work, including my parents generation. Maybe because I moved a lot from 1988 to 2004 so my friends and family were scattered. Heck, I can see messages from my Bridge club in 1999, and most of those folks were retirees.
Did you just send and receive email from your university and work accounts?
Don’t want to introduce a hijack here, but my employer (a large bank) rolled out email to all its employees around 1998 or so. At that time, broadband internet was just becoming available to the masses, either by cable or DSL. Probably less than 10% of the bank’s employees had internet in their households when we gave everybody a work email address.
Almost immediately people started using their bank email address for personal use…communicating with family, getting the recipe or prayer of the day, etc. It wasn’t a huge burden on our email server, so we let it go for a good long while, but eventually we had to crack down on personal usage.
So, yes, for several years, a fair amount of our employees used only their work email accounts.
That absolutely tracks with my experience. From the 90s to like 2002 or so, lots of people’s only email was their work email.
I was 30+ years old in 2006. Yes, I freely abused internet access at school and work for personal reasons (until I got married).
This is me too. I got a Rocketmail account in 1996 and then Rocketmail was gobbled up by Yahoo in 1997. I’ve used it ever since.
I’ve also had a Gmail account from about 2004 or 2005, when you still needed an invitation.
Is there a reason to actually cancel it, rather than just never use it?
When I moved to Toronto in 1996 I signed up with a local ISP and got an email account on their domain. They were purchased by a nation-wide telecom company 2 years later and my account was migrated to their domain. So the same email address for 28 years, but the same account for 30. I still have a handful of messages saved from 1996.
Seems right to me. When I first got into IT (as a professional, that started in 1999) not everyone had email. It was even a bit new for businesses, though by that point it was pretty ubiquitous for businesses.
Not sure if this was directed at my OP or someone’s comment but the reason I finally got rid of it was because they kept jacking up the price I paid per month. I was actually still using it until then. I had to delay killing it for a month or so to make sure all my accounts that had been attached to it has been properly changed.