An ebay registration from Sept. 1, 2000.
Indeed! I would love to hear more details if they’re not too personal. For that matter, how long has “email” (as such) been around? Obviously it would predate the WWW as such, and that was early 90’s, right?
I guess now’s a good time to see what Wikipedia can tell us…
ETA: look at this: http://www.cs.umd.edu/class/spring2002/cmsc434-0101/MUIseum/applications/firstemail.html
August 2001, when I got my yahoo account after I couldn’t remember my hotmail password and they wouldn’t accept my security answers.
3/9/99
3/6/98
Well, you said what’s the oldest date, and that is in fact the date on the message–although I received it last year. (It’s spam.) If you’d like, I can forward it to you (PM me). I have no idea how it got that date, but there it is.
However, I do have a lot of email on my computer from fall 1991, but I didn’t receive it on this computer. I received it on the BITNET system while I was a grad student at UCLA, and then copied all that mail to the my collective data for my research, which I just keep around on my current hard drive because I have the space.
Thanks for clarifying, and no, I don’t need a copy. Those 1991 documents do put yours in the running for oldest for real emails, though.
Just for giggles, and so all in this thread might see for themselves, could you copy/paste the date portion of that spam thing and put it in some quote box here?
It might provide would-be fakers evidence of tampering with the date function in emails. 
Here’s a screen shot of how they appear in my reader (Thunderbird). There are actually four of these emails that mysteriously came to me from 1969.
The only text in them are links to businesses. One of the businesses is a window contractor (in Ohio, I think), for example.
I’ve got those weird 1969-dated spam emails before too. I didn’t keep any of mine, though.
Better than what I had suggested. Thanks. I guess I ought to modify the ideas in the OP to “for real” emails. 
I’ve never saved email on a home computer. I went straight from using student/work accounts exclusively to using web mail.
The WebMail I use as the primary repository for email (incoming, outgoing, suspect, etc.) is a feature of my ISP (EarthLink), but I move the keepers into Outlook Express once a week or sooner and into folders for the correspondents I care about keeping up with. I have close to 100 such folders, with some of them being catch-all things.
Every now and then I will use the search function in OE to retrieve an old email for one purpose or another. Finding “old jewels” there is about as much fun as revisiting old threads here.
I clean out my email folders and inbox rather well. I’ve had my Hotmail account for a good 15 years, and the oldest mail there is dated 5-25-07. It contains irrelevant info, so I think I’ll purge some right now…
May I count this thread as my good deed for the week/month?
I found one that has a “Sent Date” (the way I sort my e-mail) of Jan. 1, 1970, but I think it’s safe to assume that was some kind of UNIX error at the sender’s end. (Or, more likely, a motherboard battery issue - the mail was sent to a Mac OS X support list, and when the motherboard battery on a Mac dies the date can get messed up. OS X is UNIX-based, and I think the “UNIX calendar” starts on 1/1/70, which is why I said “UNIX error”.)
Aside from that, the oldest e-mail I can find is dated July 1, 2004.
Nitpick: no, he didn’t.
Until yesterday (before I saw this thread), it was from sometime in 2009, probably shortly after I got this computer. But yesterday I deleted all emails prior to Jan 1, 2012 with only a handful of exceptions.
I saved the first e-mail I ever got. It’s from my dad, it says hello and congrats on getting an e-mail address, and it’s dated 1/17/02.
I still have emails going back to early 1995, when I first got my own personal email access. This was before I had true Internet access; I logged on to an account at Canada Remote Systems and used their shell access to view my email. Later, after getting an IP connection, I was able to download archived messages to my computer. A succession of computers and mail clients later, I uploaded the whole mess of archived messages to Gmail. Now I’m back to logging on and viewing messages…
But I can download everything via my mail client for a local archive.
I have one from 19 April 1998. I think that’s about when I signed on with my current ISP. The address is certainly my current one. I guess the earlier ones got archived and are possibly irretrievable because I was using a different email program before then.
Actually I just checked. I used to use Eudora for email and I think I blew the archives away when I updated to an Intel Mac and realised I couldn’t run the old OS9 programs.