Wow - I've had my Hotmail account for over 10 years...you?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I was running through my mail this morning, and I decided to go back into the old email archive and find my oldest email. And wouldn’t you know it I found one from an old friend of mine from Sept. 1996 - just 2 months after it’s launch on July 4th of that year…

Parts of that email that I think are cool include talking about how much easier it is to send mail this way rather than over “land”. How my friend much prefered her phone to writing an email “in” a computer from the “library” :smiley: heh…

So what’s your oldest email account?

2

I got my Hotmail address sometime in the autumn of 1996. Probably late September or early October. I haven’t logged in there for ages, though, and I don’t remember the password. This thread made me check if I could log in somehow, but there’s some Windows Live thing now and the only place they’ll send the password reset is to the Hotmail account I can’t get into. That’s the work of a great mind, that is.

The oldest one I’m still using is my Gmail account, which appears to be from November of 2004.

3

How do you go to the “old email archive?” I’ve had my account for many years, at least since I signed up here - which was in 2000.

4

I’ve had mine since probably 1998. That’s when they first gave us internet access here at my company.

5

I have had my Hotmail account (and my Yahoo account) for about ten years now. It was probably October or November 1997 when I first got online.

6

I’ve got emails in .qwk packets going back to 1996. I should have earlier ones but they must be on a HDD that isn’t online. My immediately available emails go back to 1997

7

Back the there was a little check box if you wanted to save an outgoing email…they were not automatically saved…

Through the years Hotmail has changed faces and storages capacities, they went from HoTMaiL to MSN Hotmail to Windows Live which is it now.

8

Yup, had mine for about the same length of time. Late 1996. I keep on forgetting to log in for months, and it trashes the entire account and I have to reinstate it, so all I’ve got to remind me of the longevity are the names preserved in my address book. Like, I haven’t spoken to Sue since December 1996.

So, what reasons has everyone let theirs lapse? Me, it was primarily the spam. But also the crappy interface that for a while was superceded by Yahoo, and then Gmail. Even with the new Ajax interface, the new Live Hotmail sucks shit.

9

My Hotmail’s from '96 (I’m desperately trying to switch over and clean it up now that it’s become Windows Live Mail and next to unusable on a Mac). The oldest emails are adorable, some from friends sending emails for the first time and complaining that their inboxes are empty.

10

I may still have email archived away from 1982. I had them put on a tape when I left my job. Then a few years later I tracked down the last tape reader in the department and moved the archives to floppies. Then they went onto Zip drives. I’ll have to check and see if they made the transition to CD’s or DVD’s.

In the same vein, I got some junk mail from the AAA saying “You’ve been a member for 30 years so we’ve got a great deal (life insurance, bah) for you!”

11

I still have my first Yahoo mail account from the fall of 1996. I started it at the library so I could write to the girl I eventually married. At the time, I didn’t know anybody who had a computer.

12

I’ve had my Yahoo email address since 1995. I still have *emails * from 1995!

13

I know I’ve had my Hotmail account since at least 1998, because I remember using it to exchange e-mails with my friends at school. Maybe I got it earlier than that, but the oldest e-mail I can find is from 2002.

I’ve been pretty lucky on the spam front - there was a while when I was getting a lot, but it seems to have eased up significantly. I’m still using it, because it’s a nice simple address that incorporates my name, so it’s good to use for work purposes.

14

The oldest emails I can find are from 2003 on my hotmail account, but I’m quite sure I’ve had the account for much longer than that. It’s been my only email address (aside from a work address) that I’ve ever had.

15

Hotmail as well. Late 1997.

16

I’ve had Netscape mail since late 1994 (basically whenever it started) but it’s AIM mail or something now (still same email address) and I don’t use it all that often anymore. I had someone drag me to Hotmail around 1996 but I didn’t last there for very long.

17

I have a hotmail account that I started in 1997 and a Yahoo from 1999. I don’t have any really old emails though. My oldest stored email is from March of 2000.

18

I think I made my first email account in '96 (Hotmail), but I’ve switched email accounts several times over the years. The one I use now is a Gmail account I made in 2005.

19

I’m pretty sure I got my Yahoo! Mail account in 1997, but it may have been 1998. Either way it’s been a while. Some people are amazed I got my own real name.

20

October of '96. Because of the fact that hotmail doesn’t require you to change your password, and it didn’t at that time have any limitations on passwords, my password for it is still a five letter, all lowercase dictionary word. Makes me miss the days before I cared about someone snooping through an email account.