I will try to make a poll out of this but in the meantime, how old is your oldest email still on your computer? Obviously it can be older than the machine.
How old is the oldest email on your computer that is still in your mail client?
For me: April 27 1997.
How old is the oldest email on your computer (or backup device) that is in an archive?
still checking.
The oldest email from one of my 2 current addresses is from 2003.
My oldest emails from any address preserved on the Internt are dated 1991. – They are messages on what was then a BITNET discussion list, although I was posting from an Internet address.
It’s webmail so it’s technically not on my computer, but my oldest preserved e-mail is from March of 1998. I thought it wasn’t until my senior year that I got internet but I guess not.
March 26, 1996. It was sent from my new email address at my new job to a friend. I think prior to that I had access to email via Compuserve and AOL, but didn’t preserve those. And earlier than that, we had email in college (1984-1988) but it was mainframe-based and I doubt I have any record of it. I remember the time a student actually sent an email message to a student at a different school. (This was a big deal.)
I’m a youngun. It’s not on my computer, but googling my college email address (which, scarily, includes 6 digits of my SSN, shows emails from November 1992, but I know I was throwing emails about as early as 1989-1990.
Thanks to this thread, I’ve found a forum I haven’t gone to in YEARS! Off to peruse! W00t!
As for this question, the email contains personal correspondence with friends as well as business email. Nothing earth-shattering, of course, but it’s the modern-day equivalent of saving letters and postcards, which is what people of an earlier generation did. And given that this is basically plain text files, even a lot of mail takes less than a megabyte.
Mine is from 2003 (registration confirmation for a forum that no longer exists, ha).
I have some older ones on my old computer which I no longer use, but I could hook up if I wanted to for some reason. I’m not sure how old they are, the earliest is probably around '97 or '98 or so. I’m not gonna dig it out and plug it in just to check, though.
I moved to another country, and have swapped several computers since then, so I’m amazed to have even this.
I remember one of the first emails I ever sent, back in 1995, where I got a reply within fifteen minutes, which blew me away at the time. I hadn’t realised it was instantly sent, I thought there were delays on the route that made it take a few hours. Having been used to snail mail taking several days at least, it was quite the eye-opener.
My oldest e-mail is October 3, 2000. It’s an e-mail welcoming me to my new account.
Back in those days, e-mails were often queued up and delivery could easily be delayed by hours. Sometimes they went through real fast like yours did, sometimes they didn’t. Messages are still queued, but these days five minutes is a long delay.
The longest delay I ever got in an e-mail was six months. There was a problem with the mail server. Most of the time it worked fine, but occasionally it would lose track of e-mails that were queued up on a disk spooler somewhere. Since it only rarely lost e-mails, no one realized that there was a problem until the machine ran out of disk space. The mail server was down for about half a day while they fixed it, and when it came back up, we all got our inboxes flooded with our six months worth of missing e-mails.