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Old email addresses

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by jeffdewitt

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I was reading an old readme file (from a DOS port of Adventure!) and it had the authors email address.

Sent him a note and much to my surprise he answered, he's had that address since 1991!

Does anyone have a clue what the oldest functioning email address is?

Jeff DeWitt

20 replies

by zlitocook

email called Eudora; it was the first email program. Home computers didn?t exist until the early 1980?s. That was before the Internet, so the way home computers could send email was by dialing into the same large computer and swapping messages.

I found ways around the log in and had helped with clean up and removing users.
I still have an address with in this group but have not used it in years.

by fmendez

Hi,
I am very curious on the naming convention of these email addresses. Can you provide us with some example. e.g. user@domain.com

I am pretty sure it's not like today's email addresses.

Thank you.

by jeffdewitt

I don't know about really old ones, I do know my parents set a couple of emails back and forth in the early 80's and from what Mom remembers it was a REAL pain.

In this case from 1991 the address was user@ggr.co.uk

Jeff DeWitt

by sql_joe

If you're talking about the old FidoNet style of E-mailing, it was usually a username for the BBS system that would be receiving the E-mail and then the Fidonet address, which was a series of numbers like 1:126.32.1 (I may be off a little here). The FidoNet address scheme went something like:

Country:Region.Network.BBS

Anyway, we used to call sending private mail between users of different BBS's "NetMail" since teh BBS usually had to dial the receiving BBS directly to deliver its netmail OR pass the netmail through the network. The problem was, not all BBS's allowed passing NetMail, and many did not allow their users to send Netmail. On the BBS I ran, I allowed users that had donated to the BBS to send netmail, and my system actually did connect to the receiving BBS directly to deliver it.

For non-private mail, there was many different E-Mail systems and they worked a lot like a mailing list works today. Folks could read mail on the BBS, or use a utility like BlueWave to download all the mail and read it off line, then upload their replies when they were done.

This really brings back some memories.

George

by s-f

You can see a lot of the older addresses in the newsgroup archives at Google... One of my first accounts was jnorman@gmuvax2.gmu.edu (no longer active) which I used about 1988-1991.

As I recall, almost all the accounts at that time were either .mil or .edu but followed today's rules... There were other email systems, but they all tended to be self contained until they created internet friendly converters...

I too had a Compuserve account, which I dumped when I became a MSN Beta tester...

by ike_c

Anyone of the original Beta Testers for Windows 95 would have a really old e-mail address. Even though the ARPANET and the different UNIX (HPUX-AIX), Mainframes etc., offered some sort of e-mail service, the so-called official world-wide-web came alive with the introduction of Windows 95. There were many thousands of people test-driving W95 prior to its official start date and most of them had MSN email accounts that they used even then. Mine is still alive with msn.

by frank_s

If you were beta testing Windows 95 you got an offer to also beta test the proprietary MSN service. My main email is an msn.com address I got then and still use every day. I got my first email address in 1988 and it was my member number @compuserve.com (it's long gone and I don't remember the number any more). I had joined PC Magnet, PC Magazine's forum, which was on Compuserve after buying a genuine Hayes "high speed" 2400 Baud modem for $300+!

by jamesrl

My Canadian Internet Handbook (second edition, signed by the authors) published in 1993 shows dozens of ISPs in Canada at the time, all of which provided email services. The web was alive before Win95.

I was a beta tester of Netscape in 1994, having been a user of NCSA Mosaic in late 93. These tools were in widespread use on both Macs and PCs with Win 3.11, though the setups for Win 3.11 were a little trickier (Winsock setups).

I too was on BBSs in the 80s, then moved on to Compuserve, which had an internet portal.

In 1993 I moved to a "real" ISP and that address was my main one up until I switched providers a few months ago. That 13 year old address was a huge spam target.

My ISP hasn't shut down access to that account, so I can still read the incoming emails, though I can't reply.

James

by jruby

Corporate ISP's haven't cooperated. I've had broadband internet access since its early inception. Although I haven't done anything, my home e-mail address has changed numerous times in 12 years due to corporate mergers and pissing contests. So, even though my username hasn't changed, the domain has gone through TCI, HOME, one-that-I-can't-remember, ATTBI, COMCAST, and TX.RR.COM.

Screw it, I'm going to gmail - I got a feeling I can keep that one for more than a couple of years at a time!

by cutting1

I believe it was the late 1970?s or early 1980?s I was the sysop for a community college bulletin board system, running it from my home about a half hour distant using a 300 baud Hayes, external modem. There were about 50 users, and everything was in text. Pictures were ASCII format. A timer was rigged up to reset the computer around midnight every night, so that in the winter when storms knocked out power, everybody knew that if the power was restored before midnight, the system would be back up and running, unattended. It was also handy when the college was not operating during breaks. When the Internet arrived, users slowly faded away in favor of the Internet and the system finally shut down with three die-hard users being disappointed.

by mshanahan

I had my first e-mail address in Bell Laboratories in 1976 on a unix system. E-mail between systems was mostly dial-up, 1200 baud max, and the format was MACHINENAME!LOGIN, for example btlunix!jms. jms is my initials and most logins were a user's initials. However, for the oldest e-mail addresses I think you need to check with Dennis Ritchie, and Ken Thompson who started UNIX in 1969 and I am sure had e-mail by the early 70's. Here is a link to the Oral History of UNIX www.msconsulting.us and then click on the link "Oral Unix History". mikeshanahan02@gmail.com

by fmendez

Thanks for sharing this information with me and the rest of the readers. It's really interesting, because when I started playing with emails it was back in the early 90s, and by that time we did have CompuServer, Prodogy, and AOL.
I've read and studied a lot about the Internet history (the ARPANET) and I remerber about BBS site and how we had to dialed to these systems to download through the gopher protocol a directory list; but, if you look around there are not reading materials on these old email systems.
I guess I will have to google it some more ...

by mark2631

was in about 1986.
I was at Ft. Leavenworth, KS (outside the wall of the prison) and wanted to send things to a friend at Ft. Monroe, VA. We both ahd internal email and I'd heard of this thing called the "ARPAnet", so I assumed we could connect.
To make a long story longer, the address had to acknowleege each server between her and I (which included a stop at Oakland Community College here in MI), and it turned out to be about 50 million characters long! (Well, that was a bit of exaggeration but...)
That email address was still good a couple of years ago but I've lost track since.

by tommulhern

I have had the same Hotmail address since around 1986 or 1987 and still use it. In fact, this account is so old that I was grandfathered when they made you have a password of I think it's at least 8 characters. My password is, and always has been, only 6 letters.

by mshanahan

Just a note about early e-mail format. Since everything was dialup, not all systems knew about all other systems (before DNS and Internet). You might have to send e-mail as follows mhuxm!btlunix!ihuxa!jms. Where mhuxm did not know about ihuxa, but it knew the phone number for btlunix and btlunix knew the phone number for ihuxa. So YES, mhuxm would dial btunix, send the mail, and then btlunix would dial ihuxa and send the mail to user jms on that system. All systems had banks of incoming modems and at least 1 or more out-going modems.
mikeshanahan02@gmail.com

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