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.
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.
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.
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).
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?