What Was Your First-ever Email Address & Do You Still Use It Today?

It was a combination of the department name and my name @reading.ac.uk when I was at university.

My first work email after that was ben.sinclair@scs.dra.hmg.gb which is the kind of domain you won't see a lot!

backaben53@hotmail.com — do not use it

It was the email internet service provider, which I change two years later and lost access to all my emails. That's when I realized it was a very bad idea to have your email depends on your ISP.

In 2003 Gmail changed everything and I didn't migrate since then. I still remember this article from Paul Buchheit, Gmail's original author who explained its approach to product management

What's the right approach to new products? Pick three key attributes or features, get those things very, very right, and then forget about everything else. Those three attributes define the fundamental essence and value of the product -- the rest is noise.

Owh woah this title of post memorate me another post from @ben

Tell me about your first email address

Ben Halpern ・ Apr 21 '20 ・ 1 min read

#watercooler #discuss #email

It was a @hotmail.fr for me, but can't access to this oOooOooold account because I've been stolen.

My first ever email address would have been when I was seconded to Symantec in 1994.

Then, when I got back to Blighty, I got the company set up on Demon Internet, so my second one would have been julian@CompanyName.demon.co.uk.

I haven't used either of those since 1994 and 1998 respectively.

I've had my two main current email addresses for 15-20 years.

I guess it was somethingIforgot@compuserve.com but that's loong gone.
Later I've setup the stupidly long & redundant mbaas.michaelbaas@gmail.com expecting to never really use it as my main traffic comes through other domains and its only aggregated by gmail - but still, I should've picker a shorter name ;)

Fun fact: The first email address ever created was "tomlinson@bbn-tenexa," which was created by computer engineer Ray Tomlinson in 1971. Tomlinson is also credited with inventing the use of the "@" symbol in email addresses to separate the user name from the destination address.

lynmax@logicsouth.com. Lynmax¹ is the kennel name that we use for in the AKC
Logic Source was a local dialup ISP that has since gone kaput.

1. It is a combination my wife's and my middle name (contraction). ↩

I'm not sure exactly what the 1st email address was, might've been a free address through a phone service or free host ISP. But… One of the first, if not the first, is my main email. My uncle setup our domain, with websites and email addresses back in 1998-99.

My first email was in the university student "BBS" (yes, it was called like that). A Motorola 68010 with a few megs of ram that hosted a little less than 1k students on HP-UX. The only interface available were the VT100 terminals around the campus. Only upper-year students, and only for certain courses, had access to the B/W Sun graphics terminals that were starting to pop up. And those had Mosaic installed...

Then I got a Yahoo account, a few months after it opened. And one of the first Libero.it accounts, the first mass ISP in Italy in late 1998. And finally, Gmail, of course.

Yes, I'm old; I'm a 5-digit slashdot user.