Early email services

[alexu2000]

What was your first experiences regarding email? When did you start using email and what specs and features did your first email service had? Any interesting stories regarding early email services?

[jeffpan]

Originally Posted by alexu2000

What was your first experiences regarding email? When did you start using email and what specs and features did your first email service had? Any interesting stories regarding early email services?

My first mail is 163.net (different from 163.com),which had good webmail and free smtp/pop3 support,with 5M space if I remember that correctly.
The second was Hotmail.The third is Yahoo,and still being used.

[Chipper]

My first e-mail provider was Juno and it was some time in the mid nineties. Then in 97 I changed jobs and we had e-mail which was my first time using outlook.

The one bad experience I had was with MailOps. They were good when I first signed up but then they went down the tubes.

[alexu2000]

My first email account was at my workplace. It was an email account for our department with 6 people. All of us used this shared email account, even for personal emails. It was back in in 1995. We had 10 mb disk space and it was a simple POP/SMTP account, working with the old Netscape email client.

A few months later we all discovered Hotmail and we registered. Now we had each of us our own email account. Rocketmail, Mailcity, Netaddress, was email services names that I remember from that period.

[zhak]

Before email, teletype systems (used ALL CAPS), then when returning to university, we had HP and Sun systems (later PC clones) and ran Pine (still text mode) off the central servers. Before cell phones and pagers, my family would call the department and they would send me an email, which would find me wherever I was on campus. At home, I'd telnet in and run Pine.

I think my first graphical email was Rocketmail, which became Yahoo Mail. I used Juno for several years.

[David]

I forget the year I opened a proper email account. It was in the 1980's I think. At that time my provider was offering email accounts and web access as well (it was before the graphical interface which allowed picture files) - you could purchase either email or web access separately (or buy both) I really did enjoy my first email account, but nobody else I knew had email access, so I had nobody to email to

[King Of Email]

My very first email experience was with Netscape webmail because I liked and used the Netscape browser. However by that time, most good names were already taken including my chosen internet alias and I was never satisfied with it because of that but especially after they drastically changed Netscape webmail from the attractive, ad free inteface to a stripped-down, boring, cramped, and ad filled thing. However, the first real web-based email account I had in my default name was with Mailcity.com, now Lycos.com. At that time, around the latter half of the 1990s, Lycos was the new big thing on the block and Mailcity was its email offering. However, Mailcity's size limitations and junk mail vulnerabilities soon became apparent and that's when I really started looking elsewhere for another, better free email service.

My first inkling was to try brute force address bar searches for free email using likely combinations. That's how I found both Mail and Email.com. In those days, you could type in a likely email sponsoring domain and you'd probably find one, but that was before the massive dotcom plunge of 2000 and the decline of many free email providers. For about six or seven years Lycos still maintained a paltry 5MB mailbox, at least in the US, at a time when new free email providers were offering 1GB or more, and I was about to leave it for good until at the last minute, Lycos increased the allowance from 5MB to 3GB.

I still keep the old mailboxes not only out of nostalgia, but because through it all they're still here and that is what really matters, knock on wood.

[hadaso]

Originally Posted by David

I forget the year I opened a proper email account. It was in the 1980's I think. At that time my provider was offering email accounts and web access as well ...

I think if there was web access (html+http) then it couldn't be the 80's. I think this was invented around '91. the Internet and email existed long before the web.

My "experiences regarding email" was around 1979 when I was learning to program the computer in Weizmann Institute "youth operations" unit and there where announcements all the time about what hosts we could email. So technically I had access to email since all I needed was to issue a "mail user@host" command to send email but I had no one to send to. Perhaps I used it locally to talk with other kids on the same host but we had a sort of IM functionality that we used (really just a command that writes a line to the ather accounts tty, regardless of what thae other account is doing, so one fun activity was to write a loop that floods the other kid's terminal. This Google employee was responsible for the 1st DOS attack on my account ).

Later (second half of the 1980's) I could get an account from the university where I was studying but prefered not to (though I'm quite convinced that I did correspond with my parents that were in the USA through email during 1985. However I have no record of that, and I don't remember what account I used. Now that I think of it, there was something that might deserve the name "email" that I used around early 1984 when I was in the military. It was an internal network of computers that ran an application that allowed each station to send text messages to other stations, instead of dictating these through the phone. So it was basically email, though I don't know what protocols were used behind the scenes. I even saw a working "mobile email device" in that network, though it wouldn't fit in one's pocket (it consisted of a 6x6 truck hauling a vax or pdp minicomputer, terminals, modems, microwave radiotelephone system for connection, antennas, generator, and a tent where everything was setup and operated).

I started using email regularly on 1991 when I finally got an account from the university (Tel aviv University). The first email correspondence I have on record has the other party in the .bitnet tld, which means it was still in transition from the old networks (bitnet, csnet, arpanet) to the current DNS system. I used various university accounts with various uinversities during the 1990's. Sometime in the mid-90's I got a forwarding account from ams.org - the idea back then was to have a permanent address that doesn't have to change whenever I move from one organization to another. It is still functional and receives tons of spam, someting that was not forseen back then. On the other hand it was used in some paper publications so people are still sending real email to that address (and some colleagues still have only that address of mine). It's the only address where I have a real spam problem right now.

I think around 1998-99 I got my Yahoo and my hotmail accounts. That was mainly because people started sending attachments, and the unix mail command that I was using to read/send mail did not support these. So getting a free account was the easiest and quickest solution, and separating the private email from the work email (and from the ever changing email address) seemed a good idea.

Then for a while I was collecting email accounts to make sure I get "hadaso" before anyone else does, until I realized there were too many services and I annot have them all. Meanwhile I started using free webmail even for work. One reason was that university accounts started to be much smaller in capacity than those I could get for free. Another reason was that universities started to put crazy restrictions on access (firewalls) and I found it too difficult to get to my mail from outside. It was easier to forward out and access the web based account from work and from home. So then I used onebox.com for most of my email, especially work email, and also some other free services to provide my students with an address that I can dispose of later.

I got to this place when looking for free services to use as disposable addresses for students of courses I taught, and found FastMail when testing it for that purpose. That was a turning point, partly because I then saw I can integrate everything in one place and still use different addresses, but also because onebox.com changed hands, became pay service(for which I was happy to pay at the start) and then quickly deteriorated to unusable state. So FastMail was tehre at excatly the right tiem, and since then I use FastMail, with two disposable address services (sneakemai.com and spamgourmet.com) to provide disposable addresses, and with my own domain which I thought about getting before I knew FastMail, but only after learning about fastMail it became clear that I could use the domain as I want at reasonable cost.

That's a partial summary of my "email experience" which is quite incomplete, and probably cotradicts some other such accounts I wrote on the forum in the past...

There was a thread sometime ago about the history of webmail that I started because the Wikipedia entry on webmail didn't have a good account on the history of web-based mail, especially not on the early days. Perhaps it's a good time to continue investigating this.

[jeffpan]

Why no one mentioned AOL or bigfoot?since both them were appeared very early on the internet.

[MisterTim83]

My first was an aol email back in the 90's. Then hotmail...and stuck with yahoo for several years...I think I tried hotmail again and kept a yahoo name around. Now I have fastmail. This seems to be the only email I will be using for good. Even though I do try out new emails all the time to see how they work and what they offer. Still proving that nothing beats fastmail.

[David]

Originally Posted by hadaso

I think if there was web access (html+http) then it couldn't be the 80's. I think this was invented around '91. the Internet and email existed long before the web.

Yes that is true. I was first using a proper computer in 1979 and was sending to BB's (and talking to Archie and Veronica) during the 80's. Here is my first machine, compliments of the company I worked for. It was running a major building complex which consisted of a vocational school, a hospital, and a retirement home (via leased phone lines) I do miss my old PDP 11/23.

[janusz]

I started using email in a UK university, in early 1980's (was it really that long time ago ?? ). At that time British research and educational establishments were on SERCNET, predecessor of today's Janet . One of the SERCNET's rules about email was that it could be used only for work-related matters. AFAIK, this restriction (widely ignored, of course) was imposed by the UK Post Office to protect their letter business....

And of course it was line mode only, at that time web was something to do with spiders and fishermen

[Sherry]

Like others my first was also in the 80's. Like David I was using BB's to download games and such. I remember I wanted a faster modem (mine was either 300 baud or 1200 baud) so I bought the next size up. It came with a floppy (I think it was the "real" floppy 5¼) with a program called Prodigy. For $9.95 a month I could dial into a "Community" that had some local stores, local sports, local weather, horoscopes etc. I also, like David, used gophers (like Archie and Veronica) to access stuff outside the community. After being with them awhile they gave us an email address that had the username that was just a bunch of mixed letters @prodigy.com so we could send messages (not sure if they were called email at that time) to others on Prodigy or to the two other big "communities" like Compuserve and I forget the name of the 3rd one. Later when the World Wide Web came on the scene they gave us 2 hours a day to use it. (gosh, that was all sooo long ago but very exciting at the time! )

Sherry

[The Storm]

My first email account was in the late 90s using www.start.com.au which had 6mb storage, a built in messenger/chat and news. Was a really cool email, but it went broke. Then I used Jahoopa.com, also cool, also went broke.
Since then its mainly been Yahoo Australia, also have hotmail, but prefer yahoo for sure.