Today in The History of Email (personal)
So. At this point, I've been using email for about 18 years. My first exposure to the internet was back in high school, when my FLCS would give me (after they were read by a bunch of others) some printouts of rec.arts.comics discussions. That shit was fascinating, back then.
It's a sandbox I never got to play in, but I'm gonna assume that's a good thing. Usenet people, they're crazy.
I tried to get an email account at Carleton, but there was no luck there; this was before they started offering them to every student.
Ottawa, however, was initiating at the time the National Capital Freenet, a free ISP that anyone could use. I signed up for an account as soon as I knew they were available, and got the address of bd796. I haven't touched it in over a decade, and I assume it's been recycled to some other lucky person.
The Freenet addresses were nice random characters, but they were still less incoherent than some of the compuserve addresses I saw from back in the day. a string of random characters the length of your arm.
One time Mr_weasel used my freenet email to email a friend of his in Hong Kong who also had email. This was a thing of great excitement. I was still receiving emails for him at that address for years, until he got his own and reminded Vincent of his corret email.
Algonquin was also rolling out email when I went there. It was based around a floppy disc and a copy of Pegasus, and we didn't really use it for much. I remember emailing a record producer who left his email in the liner notes once.
After I left the Gonk, I used my Freenet account for a bit more, and then went to Humber, where I got another school email. Mohj0009, IIRC. I used it a fair bit, letting my freenet account atrophy. It was probably used for a lot of my RPG.net work, particularly submitting columns. I also signed up for a Hotmail account, but who among us didn't?
After Humber, I had an interesting run with email. I got a job as a tech support rep for a free ISP in the states, Juno.com, so I had an email address with them. I also opened a Canoemail.com address, which is long gone and dead. The sole drawback of that is I no longer have my copies of that great wrestling email newsletter, The People's Report.
Early webmail was kind of useless. I don't recall, for example, Canoemail offering too many options for sorting email, I do remember a distinct lack of space for storing emails. I think I also had a Yahoo account at the time, but it was more something used for using their services than for any email.
After I left the tech support job and my next one, I was mostly using a home email address and my Hotmail address.
Then came the greatest day in human history: The day I got a Gmail account.
Gmail has been my go to address for the past several years. With the constantly increasing space and constantly increasing features, plus ease of searching, it's pretty much my only email service. Cynra & I don't even use the email service provided by our ISP, prefering to stick with the Gmail webmail. I'm only really starting to use the labels now, but they're very useful.
I remember people complaining about how Gmail was somehow insecure, because Google was placing context sensitive ads on it. These people are an amusing brand of paranoid since Gmail's no less secure than any other kind of email that isn't run off of a server in your basement using whatever encryption would take too long to crack to make it worth their time.
Whoever "they" are.
I have an address for FanExpo, but thanks to the quirks of handling multiple accounts on an iPhone, a lot of mail from it ends up in my Gmail account (with a FanExpo label). I've also got a Gmail account for the podcast, but no one uses that.
My work email is behind a brick wall of its own kind. Through quirks of fate, I've received email from friends from it occasionally, which terrifies me to an unreasonable extent.
And that is a quick tour of a couple decades worth of email addresses. Only slightly less dull than talking about my physical addresses, I guess.
It's a sandbox I never got to play in, but I'm gonna assume that's a good thing. Usenet people, they're crazy.
I tried to get an email account at Carleton, but there was no luck there; this was before they started offering them to every student.
Ottawa, however, was initiating at the time the National Capital Freenet, a free ISP that anyone could use. I signed up for an account as soon as I knew they were available, and got the address of bd796. I haven't touched it in over a decade, and I assume it's been recycled to some other lucky person.
The Freenet addresses were nice random characters, but they were still less incoherent than some of the compuserve addresses I saw from back in the day. a string of random characters the length of your arm.
One time Mr_weasel used my freenet email to email a friend of his in Hong Kong who also had email. This was a thing of great excitement. I was still receiving emails for him at that address for years, until he got his own and reminded Vincent of his corret email.
Algonquin was also rolling out email when I went there. It was based around a floppy disc and a copy of Pegasus, and we didn't really use it for much. I remember emailing a record producer who left his email in the liner notes once.
After I left the Gonk, I used my Freenet account for a bit more, and then went to Humber, where I got another school email. Mohj0009, IIRC. I used it a fair bit, letting my freenet account atrophy. It was probably used for a lot of my RPG.net work, particularly submitting columns. I also signed up for a Hotmail account, but who among us didn't?
After Humber, I had an interesting run with email. I got a job as a tech support rep for a free ISP in the states, Juno.com, so I had an email address with them. I also opened a Canoemail.com address, which is long gone and dead. The sole drawback of that is I no longer have my copies of that great wrestling email newsletter, The People's Report.
Early webmail was kind of useless. I don't recall, for example, Canoemail offering too many options for sorting email, I do remember a distinct lack of space for storing emails. I think I also had a Yahoo account at the time, but it was more something used for using their services than for any email.
After I left the tech support job and my next one, I was mostly using a home email address and my Hotmail address.
Then came the greatest day in human history: The day I got a Gmail account.
Gmail has been my go to address for the past several years. With the constantly increasing space and constantly increasing features, plus ease of searching, it's pretty much my only email service. Cynra & I don't even use the email service provided by our ISP, prefering to stick with the Gmail webmail. I'm only really starting to use the labels now, but they're very useful.
I remember people complaining about how Gmail was somehow insecure, because Google was placing context sensitive ads on it. These people are an amusing brand of paranoid since Gmail's no less secure than any other kind of email that isn't run off of a server in your basement using whatever encryption would take too long to crack to make it worth their time.
Whoever "they" are.
I have an address for FanExpo, but thanks to the quirks of handling multiple accounts on an iPhone, a lot of mail from it ends up in my Gmail account (with a FanExpo label). I've also got a Gmail account for the podcast, but no one uses that.
My work email is behind a brick wall of its own kind. Through quirks of fate, I've received email from friends from it occasionally, which terrifies me to an unreasonable extent.
And that is a quick tour of a couple decades worth of email addresses. Only slightly less dull than talking about my physical addresses, I guess.