How long have you been using email?

ivec · 12 Sep 2002, 12:02 AM

Well, it's been ~30 years since email is around, so I thought it would be interesting to see for how long we've been using it

lux · 12 Sep 2002, 02:34 AM

I start to actually use it in 1998...

milgram · 12 Sep 2002, 02:51 AM

The poll responses make me feel old.

It is pretty rare that I need to use ::, !, or either use of % in my email addresses these days. And I no longer need to route most of my email via wiscvm.

I wonder if anyone else remembers the use of those symbols, or wiscvm.

-Marc

robert@fm · 12 Sep 2002, 05:06 AM

I started to use e-mail in 1995, a year or two before the spam problem started...

lukask · 12 Sep 2002, 05:28 PM

I started using it when I worked in my first real job (must have been around 1991).
My email address was something like: jfrblk@dept.organization.nl. We were using PegasusMail for DOS on a Novell network.
After a few years I discovered that I could get a free email address that was independent of my place of work and that I could read my messages through WWW and POP at home, so I got a usa.net email address. I also discovered free forwarding accounts and signed up for Bigfoot.
When usa.net started charging for POP access, I signed up for crosswinds.net, unlimited webspace and a web/pop account for free. I used that for a couple of years.
Then IMAP presented itself to me. This is it, I thought, so I got a free IMAP account with MailAndNews. I had my email forwarded from Crosswinds to my MailAndNews mailbox.
In the mean time I had discovered the possibility to "own" your own domain and use free DNS-services, so when Crosswinds started charging for "premium services", I finally switched to an email address (or rather unlimited addresses) in my own domain, combined with free email forwarding by ZoneEdit.
After some problems with MailAndNews, I decided to sign up for several other free IMAP accounts to be safe (MyRealBox, OperaMail, etc.).
Also I signed up for RunBox when they were still free (100MB!, and great features, except for IMAP).
Finally, when MailAndNews went down, I discovered FastMail.
First I signed up for a free account, but soon I took a big step and paid for an email account for the first time: the one time member fee.
Now I am very satisfied with my email solution: my own domain + ZoneEdit email forwarding + FastMail IMAP-mailbox.

denverharless · 13 Sep 2002, 04:17 AM

lukask,
I am amazed at how much the first part of your biography looks like mine. It's also amazing how we've both ended up at fastmail.fm. I had my first account at my university. It too was fairly long. When I started paying for Internet access through a local isp, in 1994, I used the email address for that. Then I quickly saw the benefit of having an account that wasn't tied to my geographical location, since I was going to grad school and would soon be moving, probably multiple times. I considered Bigfoot, but went with usa.net (netaddress) instead. They were one of the first to go the pay route, and at the time I thought there should be good email for free. So, I quickly switched to Geocities, because it came with webspace (prior to when Yahoo bought it). I used Excite Mail for awhile too. The pop mailbox offered by Crosswinds was very attractive to me too, so I used them as my secondary account, especially after Yahoo bought Geocities.
I stayed with Yahoo, though, as my primary, using pop, from 1997 until last spring. The barage of ads on the website, plus the institution of fees sent me looking for what else was available. I had experimented with Juno, Netzero, pplmail, snap, and some others I can't remember through the years. But with the downfall of the dot-coms, last spring the email situation seemed to have changed dramatically.
I really wanted to know what other people were saying about yahoo, and that's how I found these forums. Of course, that's how I was also led to fastmail. After reading the forums for awhile and seeing the numerous options available that I was looking for, I decided to sign up with fastmail, and within a week I decided this was the first one I was willing to pay for. I don't expect to be looking for a new one for awhile. But if I do, I will know where to begin the search!

I should add that I'm now an IMAP evangelist, and I have the rare prestige of being able to boast that I've never had a hotmail account!

lukask · 13 Sep 2002, 04:29 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by harless

I should add that I'm now an IMAP evangelist, and I have the rare prestige of being able to boast that I've never had a hotmail account!

That's a nice story too! But I must confess that in the quest for the perfect email provider I did sign up for a Hotmail account some years ago, but I have never (I mean never!!) used it. I do not even remember my username, let alone my password....

For MSN messenger I use a softhome email address....

zany · 13 Sep 2002, 11:21 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by milgram

It is pretty rare that I need to use ::, !, or either use of % in my email addresses these days. And I no longer need to route most of my email via wiscvm.

I wonder if anyone else remembers the use of those symbols, or wiscvm.

Yeah - I do. I used to get my mail and usenet feed through UUCP (remember that?

)

17 Sep 2002, 06:22 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by ivec
Well, it's been ~30 years since email is around, so I thought it would be interesting to see for how long we've been using it

30 years?! Are you serious? Wow! That's really something!

I first started using email at work back in 1990 but I didn't have a personal email account until 1998.

My first email account was with Hotmail

then I tried email.com

then I tried Netscape.

Talk about going from bad to worse!

But ever since I signed up for an email account with FastMail this past January, my email woes have come to an end.

Life is now more orderly and sane. Let's hope Fastmail will be around for at least 30 years too. Cheers!

hadaso · 15 Feb 2004, 10:32 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Quasar
30 years?! Are you serious? Wow! That's really something!

See "How email was invented" and "The First Email".

I used email regularly since 1991. I still have records of sent mail from back then! I don't really remember using email before that, but I might have used it to communicate with my parents cack in 1985. Technically I had an email account back in 1979 - I had an account on the mainframe IBM 370 in Weizmann Institute and sending email to the short list of computers on the network was an option, but I had no one to write to! (pity there were no online forums for teenagers back then... we did have online conversations between terminals connected to the same machine).

I used different university accounts from 1991 till about 2000. In 1997 I got a hotmail account and a yahoo account. IIRC I got a hotmail account because I had problems writing from the university account to my wife's hotmail account or vice versa. I also didn't know what to do with attachments back then: I and all the people that I knew wer using the UNIX mail command to read/send email, and it didn't handle attachments. So using a free hotmail or yahoo mail account was an easy solution. After having to migrate all my stuff between different universities several times, and after being limited to a 0.5MB mailbox at the university while my free onebox.com account was 3MB (plus accessible anywhere, while my university account was hidden behind firewalls) I changed to forwarding all my email to my onebox account that I used for everything but registering for different services for which I used my hotmail account. I also used several other free accounts to give to different groups of people (I gave hadaso@4advice.com to my students). Emailaddresses.com was a good resource for finding these. After 4anything.com stopped providing free email I came back to emailaddresses.com to look for free email that gives a lot of MB (after one of my students sent me a whole notebook scanned as bmp files...) and I found fastmail.fm and some other providers. Meanwhile onebox.com started charging. I paid them the cheapest option ($30/year) to keep my account there because they were a pretty good service for many years. But then they decided to "upgrade" their interface, and it became horrible. By then I had some experience with fastmail.fm, and I already had an account there for about 4 months, so I moved all my email to fastmail.fm, and upgraded to member. Not much after that I upgraded to full to have more personalities. Around the same time I also discovered disposable addresses and also these forums... Now I think I "use" the forums more than email...

Spin · 16 Feb 2004, 06:49 AM

Ive been using email since 1998.

__________
Spin

mammaduck · 16 Feb 2004, 06:54 AM

I started using email in december 1996. I had just moved to the United States and thought it would be a great way to stay in touch with family and friends back home. Unfortunately nobody I knew used the internet or email in those days.

Hanneke

MithrilSilverAu · 16 Feb 2004, 09:18 AM

Umm. I started using email regular like since 1988when i first started uni. Uni student email account running through unix/vax mainframe. Man how times have changed

. Always had multiple email accounts and keep changing haha.I remember when hotmail was really ummm not that great slow servers etc...

SusanUKF · 16 Feb 2004, 09:26 AM

We have only had the internet since the beginning of September so that is when I started using email!!

Susan.

kaptitsky · 16 Feb 2004, 10:32 AM

While I did send one message to a friend who was doing an internship at FermiLab while I was at MIT in 1972, and touched All-In-One in the early 1980s, my real experience starts with CI$ and BBS mail systems in the mid 1980s, and includes a lot of experience with Network Courier (which became MS Mail), cc:Mail (before Lotus) and Higgins, all PC LAN based mail systems of the late 80's and early 90s.

View Poll Results: How long have you been using email?
Less than 3 years	4	7.41%
3-7 years	21	38.89%
7-10 years	11	20.37%
10-15 years	13	24.07%
15-20 years	4	7.41%
over 20 years	1	1.85%
Voters: 54. You may not vote on this poll

12 Sep 2002, 12:02 AM	#1
ivec Essential Contributor Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Belgrade, RS Posts: 307	How long have you been using email? Well, it's been ~30 years since email is around, so I thought it would be interesting to see for how long we've been using it

12 Sep 2002, 05:28 PM	#5
lukask Essential Contributor Join Date: Dec 1999 Location: Haarlem, Netherlands Posts: 311	Email autobiography I started using it when I worked in my first real job (must have been around 1991). My email address was something like: jfrblk@dept.organization.nl. We were using PegasusMail for DOS on a Novell network. After a few years I discovered that I could get a free email address that was independent of my place of work and that I could read my messages through WWW and POP at home, so I got a usa.net email address. I also discovered free forwarding accounts and signed up for Bigfoot. When usa.net started charging for POP access, I signed up for crosswinds.net, unlimited webspace and a web/pop account for free. I used that for a couple of years. Then IMAP presented itself to me. This is it, I thought, so I got a free IMAP account with MailAndNews. I had my email forwarded from Crosswinds to my MailAndNews mailbox. In the mean time I had discovered the possibility to "own" your own domain and use free DNS-services, so when Crosswinds started charging for "premium services", I finally switched to an email address (or rather unlimited addresses) in my own domain, combined with free email forwarding by ZoneEdit. After some problems with MailAndNews, I decided to sign up for several other free IMAP accounts to be safe (MyRealBox, OperaMail, etc.). Also I signed up for RunBox when they were still free (100MB!, and great features, except for IMAP). Finally, when MailAndNews went down, I discovered FastMail. First I signed up for a free account, but soon I took a big step and paid for an email account for the first time: the one time member fee. Now I am very satisfied with my email solution: my own domain + ZoneEdit email forwarding + FastMail IMAP-mailbox.

13 Sep 2002, 04:17 AM	#6
denverharless Cornerstone of the Community Join Date: Apr 2002 Location: Denver Posts: 505	lukask, I am amazed at how much the first part of your biography looks like mine. It's also amazing how we've both ended up at fastmail.fm. I had my first account at my university. It too was fairly long. When I started paying for Internet access through a local isp, in 1994, I used the email address for that. Then I quickly saw the benefit of having an account that wasn't tied to my geographical location, since I was going to grad school and would soon be moving, probably multiple times. I considered Bigfoot, but went with usa.net (netaddress) instead. They were one of the first to go the pay route, and at the time I thought there should be good email for free. So, I quickly switched to Geocities, because it came with webspace (prior to when Yahoo bought it). I used Excite Mail for awhile too. The pop mailbox offered by Crosswinds was very attractive to me too, so I used them as my secondary account, especially after Yahoo bought Geocities. I stayed with Yahoo, though, as my primary, using pop, from 1997 until last spring. The barage of ads on the website, plus the institution of fees sent me looking for what else was available. I had experimented with Juno, Netzero, pplmail, snap, and some others I can't remember through the years. But with the downfall of the dot-coms, last spring the email situation seemed to have changed dramatically. I really wanted to know what other people were saying about yahoo, and that's how I found these forums. Of course, that's how I was also led to fastmail. After reading the forums for awhile and seeing the numerous options available that I was looking for, I decided to sign up with fastmail, and within a week I decided this was the first one I was willing to pay for. I don't expect to be looking for a new one for awhile. But if I do, I will know where to begin the search! I should add that I'm now an IMAP evangelist, and I have the rare prestige of being able to boast that I've never had a hotmail account! Last edited by denverharless : 13 Sep 2002 at 04:21 AM.

16 Feb 2004, 09:18 AM	#13
MithrilSilverAu Member Join Date: Jan 2004 Location: Australia Posts: 30	Umm. I started using email regular like since 1988when i first started uni. Uni student email account running through unix/vax mainframe. Man how times have changed. Always had multiple email accounts and keep changing haha.I remember when hotmail was really ummm not that great slow servers etc...

12 Sep 2002, 02:34 AM	#2
lux The "e" in e-mail Join Date: Jan 2002 Posts: 2,274	I start to actually use it in 1998...

12 Sep 2002, 02:51 AM	#3
milgram Senior Member Join Date: Apr 2002 Location: Massachusetts Posts: 138	The poll responses make me feel old. It is pretty rare that I need to use ::, !, or either use of % in my email addresses these days. And I no longer need to route most of my email via wiscvm. I wonder if anyone else remembers the use of those symbols, or wiscvm. -Marc

12 Sep 2002, 05:06 AM	#4
robert@fm The "e" in e-mail Join Date: Feb 2002 Location: London, UK Posts: 4,681	I started to use e-mail in 1995, a year or two before the spam problem started...

16 Feb 2004, 06:49 AM	#11
Spin The "e" in e-mail Join Date: Dec 2002 Location: Tampa, FL (Cincinnati, OH in the Summer) Posts: 2,446	Ive been using email since 1998. __________ Spin

16 Feb 2004, 06:54 AM	#12
mammaduck Cornerstone of the Community Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Netherlands Posts: 706	I started using email in december 1996. I had just moved to the United States and thought it would be a great way to stay in touch with family and friends back home. Unfortunately nobody I knew used the internet or email in those days. Hanneke

16 Feb 2004, 09:26 AM	#14
SusanUKF Intergalactic Postmaster Join Date: Oct 2003 Location: Canada Posts: 5,428	We have only had the internet since the beginning of September so that is when I started using email!! Susan.

16 Feb 2004, 10:32 AM	#15
kaptitsky The "e" in e-mail Join Date: Aug 2002 Posts: 2,186	While I did send one message to a friend who was doing an internship at FermiLab while I was at MIT in 1972, and touched All-In-One in the early 1980s, my real experience starts with CI$ and BBS mail systems in the mid 1980s, and includes a lot of experience with Network Courier (which became MS Mail), cc:Mail (before Lotus) and Higgins, all PC LAN based mail systems of the late 80's and early 90s.