Your very first email address

[Phil__G]

Today, having another clear-out, I found a large wad of business cards from way back when I was on PC Networks (BT was mostly Novell and NT) and in the contact details was my old Telecom Gold ID which was "82:TSA125"

This set me looking for any evidence of my very first email address, which was "philg@juggler.bt.co.uk" (via an IBM RS6000). The earliest email I could find was 1995, and the context suggested it was at least a year old - so I reckon I must have had my very first email address by 1994. That seems quite recent to me, I expected it to have been much earlier but thats all I could find.

Prior to that we had a mainframe 'mail' system called HOST, a really crude screen-at-a-time system which you'd access via a 3270 Irma card and an SNA connection. From HOST BT moved on to MS Mail but I think this was internal, pre-internet, though there were gateways. We installed the NT servers and I remember developing a few MS Mail utilities to aid our support job.

My current talk21 email I've kept for a very long time - Talk21 was my very first project when I moved onto BT's network & security design team so its very nostalgic to me and I'll hang on to it as long as I possibly can

I was wondering when others began using email, did you get to choose one or was it given to you? also I remember using usenet groups like alt.guitar , rec.music , comp.software and such.
Much simpler days!

Cheers
Phil

[nigelr2000]

My email nigelr2000@*******.com dates from 2000 I had a freeserve email before that then a compuserve number which I can't remember but was a load of digits

[hamid_1]

My first personal use of email was in 1995 using CompuServe. My email address was my user ID which was 101323,2634 . CompuServe members could send email to me using just my user ID. Other internet users could send me email by replacing the comma in my user ID with a full stop, then adding @compuserve.com , i.e. 101323.2634@compuserve.com , CompuServe members could send email to other Internet users by addressing it as INTERNET: followed by their internet email address.

At the time, it was not possible to choose your user ID, but not long after, CompuServe gave users the opportunity to create their own website with your own choice of name. So I chose 'hamid' and my website address was http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/hamid/
Long gone now of course, but you can find snapshots of it on web.archive.org

It eventually became possible to change your email address to the name you had chosen instead of your numeric user ID, however I never actually made the change. There was a technical reason why, but I won't go into it unless you're curious.

CompuServe was a US-based online service with a presence in many countries. It was priced in US Dollars $9.95 per month for up to 5 hours' use, plus telephone call charges, which in my case involved a non-local phone call to London. Compared with today, Internet and email was very expensive back then! The one good point about CompuServe was that they had many local phone numbers in the USA and Canada. At the time, I visited those countries frequently. I could normally find a local phone number to access CompuServe over there, and in the USA and Canada, local phone calls are free (included in line rental). So I had access to email and a little bit of web browsing for no extra cost while abroad.

Things moved on, and as the Internet took off over here, I found cheaper UK-based providers, but kept the CompuServe account going for a number of years.

[SiriusHardware]

Mine was, somewhat appropriately for a brand new email user, a virgin.net address. Remember the days when you used to be able to pick up an internet installation CD which would install a browser / offline email composer / reader / 'news' reader and set up your dial up connection and email server settings for you? There were plenty around and once you chose one you were reluctant to change anything because it meant you'd lose the email address...

It was only quite recently that I finally turned to ISP - independent email providers like Gmail and Hotmail (as was) so I could change ISPs whenever necessary without having to change my email address.

[Buzby123]

I've only had one email address from the start.

When I got 'on the web', a long, long, time ago, the first thing I did was register a .com domain of my own, my surname.

It's been hosted on quite a few different providers over the years, but the name remains the same.

There are a lot of benefits to owning your own domain. For example, I can create specific email addresses for specific websites. This lets me filter replies easily, and also lets me know who's selling my address ( or who has had their mailing lists hacked ! )

Also, each member of my family has their own email email address in the same format.

The downside is I get loads of spam. When you've had the same address for 25+ years it gets known by every scraper out there !.

Regarding the earliest email I can find, that was in 2000. I had a computer failure and lost my emails. ( I might have them archived somewhere, but they are probably on a ZIP disk or a unlabelled floppy in the attic.

The first email I remember receiving was from my sister around 1995, who was on an Antarctic survey ship surrounded by ice !. I thought this amusing. I couldn't email my mates in the same town, but could communicate with someone in Antarctica.

Cheers,

Buzby

[Keith956]

First email address I had was 34 years ago - January 1990 - when I worked for a US software company. Although I'd had intra-company email before that this was the first to be able to communicate with the people in the outside world. We also had access to Usenet (remember that?) although worldwide web use didn't start until the advent of AltaVista in the mid 90's.

Later around 2000 I started using a VPS and registered a domain name for email I've kept ever since.

[mole42uk]

My first email was @mole.demon.co.uk - I was one of the very first Demon subscribers so it must have been 1993. So much time has passed since then!!

[Dave Moll]

My first forays into email, first working for Istel Ltd using their own system called Comet and later at home on a system called Greennet, were both pre-internet stand-alone systems in the mid to late 1980s. On the internet later I became davemoll on hotmail. All these addresses have long since passed into history, as has a later Tiscali address.

Originally Posted by mole42uk

My first email was @mole.demon.co.uk - I was one of the very first Demon subscribers so it must have been 1993. So much time has passed since then!!

I was les@corfe-castle.demon.co.uk - in the happy days of Demon, around the same time! Got out when it changed hands.

[Radio Wrangler]

HP private email system, early eighties. Address was full name and division number, 1400.

David

[Richard_FM]

The first one was rpdavies@excite.com in 1998, Excite was passed through a few owners before it closed down about 2 years ago. I could pay to have all my old emails ported to a different server but as I wasn't using it much by that point I decided it wasn't worth it!

I has set up another on Hotmail a few months later which is still in use.

[Lloyd 1985]

I think my first email address was an @Waitrose.com! And that was around 2002, I ended up ditching it when they decided they wanted to charge £20 a year, it was free until then. So then I moved to Hotmail.com, and I have had that email address since probably 2004! It’s got a daft long name, rather than my actual name, and it’s surprising how little spam it gets, plus it’s really easy to spot the spam as it tries to use the daft name as my name… I also have another hotmail email, which does use my real name, and that one always takes a hammering from the spammers. I recently got a Gmail account too, just so I could set up a Nest thermostat.

Regards
Lloyd

[Jeremy M0RVB]

I wish I had written all this stuff down back then. My first proper (I guess) email was a work one but pre-wider Internet and little-endian, so whatever@uk.ac.leeds before it got switched to whatever@leeds.ac.uk. That was 1984 at a guess. But before that I used dial-up BBSs which had mail of sorts using addresses made up of routes. I also had a csnet one too, just can't remember!

[bigfathairyvika]

Can't really remember what the address was as I never used it, but was told I had one, which was on 'JANET'.
I also remember having some long winded compuserve address which again, I never really used.
Eventually I setup the companies first email server using a network which soon became demon Internet. Even then I didn't use the thing, I just made sure it worked for everyone else. "Call me on the phone" was a phase I used to use quite often.
Finally after setting up email servers all over the place I did finally use a email address but cannot remember what it was.
The only one I remember is the one I have now which I got when hotmail started.

[wireman]

This is a tricky one.

I had a personal email (Demon internet) in 1997, the website I created around that time can be found on the Internet Archive starting Jan 1997.

I had an (externally accessible) email address when I was at University and the earliest record I can find is 1986 but it could have been earlier. The very early JANET host addresses were reversed from the scheme we have today, that created complications with email.

[ScottishColin]

First work email address was my staff id @ company in the 90s. We had a connection to IBMMAIL which meant we could send external emails - our internal email system was a mainframe based CICS app (EOSS) and then we moved to MEMO (which if memory serves me correctly was written in-house by Volvo then re-sold as it was liked by others.

First home email address was Freeserve which must have been late 90s - colin@haynes97.freeserve.co.uk.

First web site was in 1999 here to to nerdy things with OS/2 - it proved surprisingly popular with tens of thousands of hits each year and lots of requests for help:

https://web.archive.org/web/20040612123354/http://www.haynes97.freeserve.co.uk/

Colin.

[G6Tanuki]

My first was simply "J3D" on the Aberystwyth University Honeywell 6080 mainframe in the late-70s. OK, it didn't network with any other computer systems but was still handy for keeping in touch with student friends/partners/Rugby-team members across two campus sites [the Welsh Agricultural College a few miles away was also connected] in those pre-mobile-phone days.

My next email address was a 'bang-path' type, hanging off a uucp-networked PDP11/34 at the University of London Computer Centre in the very-early-80s. From that I got into EARN/BITNET, which was based on IBM SNA/SDLC protocols generally running on VM/CMS mainframes though there were plenty of implementations using non-IBM hardware [PDPs, Honeywell, Gould, and a CTL Modular/1].

Through it, we had access to the US DARPA network, and I discovered the likes of the INFO-HAMS email digests served by Keith Petersen and his simtel20.wsmr.army.mil TOPS-20 system. The then-current LISTSERV and MAJORDOMO stuff, to which you could send simple commands in an email message to subscribe/unsubscribe to mailing-lists, and get hosted files sent to you by email, was kinda fun.

Our BITNET peers were TAUNIVM [Tel Aviv], TREARN [Turkey], RALVM [Rutherford Appleton Lab] and BLEKUL11 [a PDP11 at a Catholic University on Leuven].

Then came the emergence of JANET, the UK's academic network. I appear on some of the originating documents as being the guy who knows 'odd stuff' about GEC4000-series packet-switches... paradoxically it used 'Grey Book' mail with a back-to-front naming convention so all the hostnames began uk.ac - this was all X.25 addressed and there was no concept of a DNS so hosts had to nightly download a database from a central server at Daresbury Labs.

In the early-90s everything switched to TCP/IP and RFC822 email, much to the annoyance of those who had followed the general academic-centred obsession with OSI and X.400 email.

Anyone remember the late 80s and the bang-path april-1st hoax of kgbvax!kremvax!

[TonyDuell]

Mine was on JANET back in the mid 1980s : ard12 at uk.ac.cam.phx (or I think 'cambridge.phoenix')

[G6Tanuki]

In my JANET-related days I got a reputation for being the guy-to-go-to for installing the Kermit PC-to-mainframe and terminal-emulation software on the various mainframes of the day [it was kinda fun transliterating between ASCII and EBCDIC on IBM and IBM-clone hardware... I learned a lot about the IBM7171 'Yale ASCII terminal interface controller' and dialup!] and so when the Polytechnic of Badgersville asked me to implement the host-end of Kermit for them, I naturally got a kermit@ email-address set up on their systems, with sysadmin-level write-rights to their software libraries so I could install new host-end versions.

Kermit was kinda fun; I had a quote something like "If you can't network it using Kermit you should bury it at midnight with a stake through its CPU". The coming of early laptops was a bit of a problem though, some of them [hey Toshiba!] used custom serial-port hardware to reduce power consumption. I wrote a specially-optimised Kermit - called Toshi-Kerm - to handle this.

I remember horrifying the guys at one University computer-centre where I did some consulting in 1985, turning up with a then-brand-new one of the first in the country HP 4951A protocol-analyser and within minutes diagnosing a 64Kbit/sec X.25/HDLC clock-slippage problem that had kept their VAX-based mail-server offline for a week.

Ah happy days.

[wireman]

I do recall a gateway from UK email to the US and some terrible character conversions as noted above that destroyed program text.

As for downloading nightly Janet databases, I don't recall that as hosts you talk to don't change that frequently but I do remember someone had created sendmail macros to convert between the two conventions. There was a book on sendmail, I got a free review copy from O'Reilly.