Which is the oldest free email provider?
 

I've read somewhere (probably) that altern.org is online since 1993.

Unless the Whois is wrong Altern.org was created on 31-May-1996.

Yahoo on 1996-Nov-06 and Hotmail on 27-Mar-1996.

So if you go by the Whois, Hotmail is the oldest. But there must have been free email providers before 1996. Maybe somebody else can answer this so I don't have to go start Googling again. I am curious too now :)

Hanneke

In the UK, I believe that it is Freeserve.

Freeserve.co.uk created on: 31-Jul-1998
Freeserve.com created on: 12-Dec-1998

If I recall correctly, hotmail was the first free provider of email as we know it today.

However that wasn't the first email system used. The first real email sent was on ARPANET (I found this article for you).

Does anyone remember (pre-email times) using Novell commands to send messages to each other through, I believe the command was SNDMSG? There was a character limitation, and this is how we used to send messages to other nodes on the network...kind of a precursor to email and IM...

I started using email in 1991 (at least my first saved messages are from then. )

I remember when we were kids (around 1979-1981) we used to play with the IBM mainframe in the Weizmann Institute of science, and it was possible to send messages to each other's terminals. It would just write on the recipient's terminal, regardless of what the user did. The first DOS attack directed at me was a simple loop a friend wrote that wrote lines on my terminal screen). We only used it to write each other on the same computer, but as far as I can recall, it could be used to communcate with other computers connected to bitnet, and scientists did use it or email to communicate with colleagues around the world. I remember as a teenager it looked so cool that you can actually communcate with all those computers on the net. The list of computers on the net was almost a whole page. By the end of the year it was already several pages.

I also remeber when they switched from bitnet to the DNS system, and tried to educate people to use the domain name (like university.edu) instead of the old host names on bitnet (there was a long time they had things like computername.bitnet in addition to the dns system that we use now.)

Perhaps the details as I recall them are not so accurate. I just remeber it looked cool how the network got bigger and the whole world gets connected, but personally I didn't use the computer for anything useful between 1981 and 1991.

The oldest free Australian email provider was Start.com.au Unfortunately they stopped offering email last July.

Dan.

Do we even have internet at 1993? :confused:

Was Hotmail before Rocketmail? Juno has been around for awhile too. Those were all active before the web portals got into the email game.

sdf.lonestar.org now also called freeshell.org was started in 1987 and according to whois "Record Created on 08-Nov-1989".

But do they provide free email since their birth?

I found: www.mycybersoup.com ---- copyrigth 1996-2003

See Hobbes' Internet Timeline.

I know I had an email account since 1991, and that's only because I was being very conservative about using the computer back then. Most of the people around me were using email long before that. For many people in the academic world it was already the prefered way to communicate in the late 80's. The most common interface were I was back then was the UNIX "mail" command, and that's what I've been using until about the year 2000 (then I switched mostly to free webmail.)

I think that Hotmail was the first free web based e-mail provider. I remember it well because I was on one of the early unlimited ISPs. I used it because it had a local number and didn't limit your time online, but its e-mail was terrible. When Hotmail came out it was a huge blessing. It had e-mail since its birth, because that's all it was at the time and it wasn't owned by Microsoft. Yahoo did not. It was a web portal first and then introduced e-mail.

Yes, see this is what I remember too.

harless, Rocketmail and Juno came much later.

But despite the name, Freeserve isn't free and never has been (unless you mean "as in speech, not as in beer";)); it was initially pay-as-you-go, which (as with mobile phones) is just about the most expensive way to do it, except for very light users...

The oldest UK free email I know of is PEMail (Personal EMail), founded in (IIRC) March 1997, over a year before Freeserve; they later changed their name to PMail (rather naughty of them, as this was already the short-form of the name of Pegasus Mail), and later still (deservedly) crashed and burned...