# your oldest email
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-oldest-email/514958
**Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
**Created:** [October 24, 2009, 1:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-oldest-email/514958 "2009-10-24T13:10:01Z")
**Posts on this page:** 9
**Page:** 2
### Author:  [@dhkendall](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dhkendall)
#### Post date: [October 25, 2009, 5:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-oldest-email/514958/21 "2009-10-25T17:01:09Z")
I got an email from Ray Tomlinson dated 1971.
Nah, just kidding, that was a year before I was born! (Although I think the day will come when parents can’t leave the hospital with their newborn until the little tyke has a name and an email address … )
My oldest email I think is from April 16, 1999 (posted to a Usenet group about a TV show that I no longer watch, and one of the stars of the show thanked me in an email for spelling his name right. Figured hanging on to an email from a celebrity was kind of cool.)
I believe my previous email account was Unix based, didn’t require a browser program but had to be read on your computer. I’ve been on the 'net since 1994 fwiw.
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### Author:  [@Chefguy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chefguy)
#### Post date: [October 25, 2009, 5:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-oldest-email/514958/22 "2009-10-25T17:05:20Z")
Man, there are some anal folks on this board! My oldest incoming is from April and oldest sent email is from June. I take out the trash on a regular basis, obviously. I normally keep three months’ backlog of sent emails, and delete most incoming within days. The stuff going back to April are messages my wife wanted to preserve as part of a project she’s contemplating; otherwise, they’d be long gone.
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### Author:  [@MindWanderer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MindWanderer)
#### Post date: [October 25, 2009, 11:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-oldest-email/514958/23 "2009-10-25T23:51:56Z")
My oldest that I still have was 7/21/2005 from a friend of mine talking about Google’s maps of the moon.
I had a yahoo email account before that but once I stopped using it they deleted my account.
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### Author:  [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)
#### Post date: [October 26, 2009, 12:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-oldest-email/514958/24 "2009-10-26T00:34:28Z")
I only used web-based email. My current account dates back to 2/22/06, as that’s when I got the welcome email that seems to be standard these days. My first email from a real person (besides me) wasn’t until much later (12/28/07), as I didn’t use it as my default for a while.
My previous account, which I just rescued from a spammer, dates back to 8/27/01, which was a forward from my old account. The first real person wasn’t until 10/2/01.
I used to have my email backed up from back when I used Pine on my shell account (Using Windows 3.1 Terminal, or later a DOS program called Telix, which worked in Color). But I seem to have misplaced it. And I doubt the original 5.25" Floppy still works.
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### Author:  [@Equipoise](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Equipoise)
#### Post date: [October 26, 2009, 7:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-oldest-email/514958/25 "2009-10-26T07:30:37Z")
I keep almost all personal e-mails, received and sent. The oldest one on my Eudora is from 1994. The oldest one on my Yahoo account is from 2001. However, I too have floppy discs and old Amiga hard drives with mails from 1989, when we got on the internet. I mourn the mails I’ve lost in crashes over the years. I had backups but it didn’t save everything. That’s one reason I started my Yahoo account. I’d have a heart attack if my Yahoo account got wiped. I wish I could download the most important ones, in a chunk (not one by one).
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### Author:  [@Harmonious\_Discord](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Harmonious_Discord)
#### Post date: [October 26, 2009, 12:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-oldest-email/514958/26 "2009-10-26T12:35:58Z")
12/11/1999 without too much searching in subfolders.
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### Author:  [@control-z](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/control-z)
#### Post date: [October 26, 2009, 4:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-oldest-email/514958/27 "2009-10-26T16:49:21Z")
My “In-Archive” box starts Wed, 03 Jan 1996.
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### Author:  [@rbroome](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rbroome)
#### Post date: [October 28, 2009, 1:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-oldest-email/514958/28 "2009-10-28T01:24:19Z")
> [@rbroome](#):
>
> 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.
Interesting. I tend to think of email and the internet being co-equal. But the earliest email noted here is from around 1989. I was using message boards in 1985 but I don’t think I actually starting using email, certainly not with any regularity until 88-89. And back then one had to be careful about what was meant by email. There was Fidonet and the protocol that used a ! instead of @ to delineate the domain. So I am going to say the mid to late 80s was the start of popular use of email. Prior to that, I don’t know that it would be considered email by today’s usage.
So, a related question: what is the oldest email server domain? Clearly the equipment and software will have had to be updated many times, but anyone care to hazard a guess as to the oldest still functioning domain?
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### Author:  [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)
#### Post date: [October 28, 2009, 2:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-oldest-email/514958/29 "2009-10-28T02:58:58Z")
> [@](#):
>
> So, a related question: what is the oldest email server domain? Clearly the equipment and software will have had to be updated many times, but anyone care to hazard a guess as to the oldest still functioning domain?
ncsa, maybe?
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