I bought a gmail invite from a message board. If this sequence of words makes sense to you, you’re old too.
I got an invite to Gmail when I was in university. Sadly I was at inbox zero for quite some time so I don’t have the Welcome to Gmail email anymore. It’s more than likely my oldest active account. I do have a Neowin account that still works from 2002 but I don’t frequent anymore. Macrumors is my most active old forum account, that’s from 2005. I had an ancient AIM and ICQ account but there’s no way I could remember the account details.
Ditto for the AIM and ICQ.
I think I read recently that ICQ was shutting down.
I still remember when AIM shutdown for good. That was a sad day.
I mean you could always make a new account to get the welcome email and photoshop the dates and times to make it look like it’s older. I imagine the look of the email now is different from 2003, tho.
:-(
TIL G-Mail was invite only back then. I am too GenZ to undersand this shit.
A pattern they repeated with Google Wave and Google+, neither of which took off, partly because there weren’t enough people using them.
I genuinely thought G+ could have been a FB killer, if they hadn’t made it hard to join.
Ditto - oldest email I still have in archive is from Nov. 2006 so at least that old
Mine was from a chain of random people posting their invite links on Slashdot. It feels like ancient history now.
I still have a Slashdot account from 2009. Haven’t been on there much in years though. Google would probably be my oldest actively used account as I still use the one I set up with the initital invite.
Shiiit, actually that does make sense. I remember when Gmail gave you 10 invites for new accounts and you didn’t even get them right away. You had to earn them over time. So yeah, invites were regularly sold on the message boards I used to frequent.
My Hotmail account, which I’ve had since high school. Oldest email in there is from 2002, but I think I opened it up in 2000.
same, but yahoo.
All my friends and I used to have Yahoo! email addresses. But for some reason around 2010 almost everyone’s accounts seemed to be getting compromised and sending weird messages around to their contacts… and now I don’t know anyone with a Yahoo!
I never figured out what was going on and why Yahoo in particular seemed so affected by it.
mines for spam too.
Same, but my original Hotmail account is long lost. I still have the one I made around 2000 though.
RIP suckitdown@hotmail
Same. I use mine to log into things that require an email so they can spam you.
Same here, made one in 1999, the MSN messenger days were wild.
Probably my 2004 Gmail account, but that’s pushing the definition of “still use somewhat frequently”. I do still have my email forwarded to my current address, but most senders have been updated with my current address.
I lost control of my Hotmail, AIM, ICQ accounts years ago.
I still have my ICQ. That’s one number burned into my brain.
Didn’t ICQ recently shut the service down? Thought I saw a headline along those lines recently.
Did they? I only log in like every six months or so. :(
Edit: yep. June 24, 2024. RIP 8833052
Oh… RIP 170538332 (I forgot the password for my first one and had to create a second one, and for some reason that’s the number that stuck with me)
Somehow I can never seem to forget my ICQ number. 28493804. I have no idea why that’s always in my brain, but it is.
Uh-oh! Mine was long forgotten.
deleted by creator
I think my AIM account is still technically active even though they shut it down. Don’t know what they did with all the accounts.
Usenet account from 1987. And no, I’m not going to post what it is.
X-No-Archive: yes
What’s “on” there? What can it be compared to at this time?
Usenet was the golden age of Reddit for its time. Before the binary newsgroups drowned everything out and web 1.0 captured everyone’s attention.
In a way, it was a lot like Lemmy. Federated servers all inter-exchanged posts to a giant, global message board of newsgroups (roughly analogous to a subreddit or Lemmy community). Anyone could create a newsgroup and there were a lot of them.
When it was good, it fostered the same kind of genuine conversation that Reddit and Lemmy do when they’re at their best. It was full of memes, too, although that word didn’t exist then.
I haven’t actually used that account other than to verify it is still there on my old university’s servers, in almost 20 years. I probably should try it out again.
Usenet? Most new media can be found there. The most copyright-contentious files are not on there for long so most folks use automated downloaders.
My original Gmail account. I’ve had it since Gmail was in closed beta.
My Steam account is older though. Fucking thing is old enough to drink now (2003; from when I first had to use it for Counter-Strike when they took down the WON servers).
Any other 21 year old Steam accounts wanna play some Ragdoll Kung-Fu?
Damn, I have almost the exact same answer. Switched to Steam once WON got taken down (held out as long as I could), and had a friend send me a Gmail invite a few months later.
Only differences are that I mostly used mine for TFC, and my account won’t technically hit drinking age until early next month.
I kinda wish I could say I had like a bottle of liquor I’ve been saving for the occasion, but the idea of a “21-year-old Steam account” genuinely never occurred to me until one day I woke up and realized it was about to turn 18. Made me realize how fast shit moves, and this is just driving the point home…
… are you me? What this guy said is also my answer.
Oh man I’ve not dusted off ragdoll Kung Fu in a very long time
Xiao xiao?!?
I’ve got a 20 year old Gmail account that I use when I need to sign up for something.
A four letter .com domain name I registered in 2003. Supposedly worth $5000-6000 presently.
Or my eBay account I’ve had since 2001.
A word in the dictionary?
Pretty sure that’d be worth much, much more than mine :)
I’ve had my Hotmail amount for like 25 years
Same. Got in early, and it’s just my first and last name. I use it now as a bin for accounts for websites i dont want in my main inbox.
I also have an aol email address from around the same time that im scared to open.
Who knows what’s in there.
How much is too much Hotmail?
Hotmail was one of my very first email accounts but I believe Microshaft had already bought it by the time I signed up. I think I was about 12 or 13.
Steam account. Made in 2007, back then i used for a random game i bought having a cd key; but I still use it frequently.
Next month my steam account will be 21.
Created it shortly after steam launch.
I had to wait over night in a download queue to download the stream client bundled with cs 1.6 (which then also took a couple hours)
Yeah steam for me also, back in 2004 so about to hit that 20 year badge. I technically had an older steam account with the OG HL, CS, and DoD on it, but my current account had HL2 and CSS on it so I stuck with that. I think it’s even older than my Gmail account tbh.
I had steam before I had an email (with my father’s email). I was half the age I am now
A hotmail account from before microsoft bought it
Yep. Same. I can’t think of anything older that is still operating.
My AOL email. I didn’t actually make it, my Dad did and I was so young I literally don’t remember a time without it. I still check it despite migrating most of my accounts away.
probably neopets, can’t let them starve.
My Neopets account got wiped shortly before they said they’d stop wiping accounts. I’d lost the password and recovery email ages ago though.
I joined a forum about 30 years ago, and I am still a regular. I can’t say the exact date I joined, nor can the forum admins, as things like that were not tracked back then. Even them having my email was a way later add-on.
I have a Yahoo email account from the mid-late 90’s…
Same. It would have been 1997 or later.
Mine’s about the same age, 97 or 98. Log into it very infrequently but it still works.
Everything else I recall having an account on from the late 90s no longer exists.
ebay. 1998
Same, but it isn’t my oldest.