My very first email address is gone forever
1054 words (~7 mins read)
My very first email address was richan5@eresmas.com. The password to access it was simply “ajedrez”, which means “chess” in Spanish. I don’t mind writing this publicly because I just found out that my first email account no longer exists. I hadn’t used it since I created my current Gmail account back in 2008, almost 20 years ago. And yet it felt as if one of my first footprints on the internet is now gone forever. In fact, I’m not sure I could find an older footprint.
My first venture into the internet
I can’t remember if I was 11 or 12 years old. I think I was 11 years old. I was already into video games, computers, and strategy games. I had been so since I was old enough to sit in front of a screen and input stuff via mouse and keyboard. But the internet was still a fascinating new concept to me. I had played StarCraft (my favorite video game ever) already for a few years, and with the internet I would be able to play with people in a remote location. That thought honestly felt magical. But back in 2000 internet at home was far from mainstream in Spain. The computer room in my school had just received internet access, and it was heavily restricted. A few of my schoolmates already had internet at home, but I wasn’t so lucky. One of those schoolmates who did was the one who showed me how to get my first email address.
He suggested to grab a free email address from EresMas, a popular ISP in Spain back then. I chose “richan” because my best childhood friend had nicknamed me “Richan” years ago (I realized how cringey that was when I discovered that “-chan” in Japanese is a suffix denoting a small child or a female character 😅). And “ajedrez” as my password since I already loved chess back then. This email address allowed me to reach out to people who created and edited StarCraft fan-made maps, and thus I made my first online friends. Remembering all of this is quite nostalgic honestly. Soon I created a second email account, richan10@eresmas.com. My reasoning was that I wanted different addresses for different things (not sure if I didn’t know about filters back then, or if email filtering was not yet a thing, can’t really remember!). I created these addresses back in school, before I ever got an internet connection at home (which I finally got when I was 14 years old).
A screenshot from EresMas back in 2001. Source: this tweet
Eresmas, Orange, and Gmail
EresMas eventually got acquired by Orange, another Spanish ISP, and access to those email addresses was routed to their web portal. I created yet a third email address back then, richan@orangemail.es. And while I used these three addresses for years, refusing to ever create a Hotmail or Yahoo account (I barely touched MSN Messenger!), at some point I did try out Google’s new email client, Gmail, and was blown away at how good it was. The UI was so clean and intuitive! And there were no embedded ads and much less spam.
That’s right, spam became a big problem in my original email addresses. As a teenager I rarely cared about privacy. Although my schoolmate had educated me on how I should obscure my personal data and never give my real data to strangers (I thank him for that!), giving my addresses out freely meant I got a looooot of spam. And while Gmail had good spam filters, Orange did not. So yeah, almost 20 years ago my original addresses became this disposable bin and an email I could give out more freely (e.g. when requiring a one-time login to a website), while I was more careful with my Gmail accounts. It was a primitive way of having the benefits of email aliases back then.
Evolution of Online Communication
Email was the primary way of communicating online back when I took my baby steps into the internet. A few years later internet forums became all the rage and I spent so many evenings in them. To be honest many teens also used MSN Messenger, but I preferred the async nature of communication. Some years later Facebook and social media became the norm. And nowadays that social media sucks, most people have moved on to Discord servers. Email still exists, of course, but it’s used mostly for transactions, newsletters, and formal communication.
These days I’m still using Gmail even though Google has turned much worse as a company in the last decade. With an ad-blocker, I’m free of publicity, and Gmail lets you configure the UI to your liking as well as tons of settings. I have given Proton mail a try, but despite the benefit of privacy, it doesn’t feel like a comfortable email client, and I can’t quite follow a GTD approach with it. Gmail has also spoiled me into not wanting to pay for email services, but I reckon I might need to change that perception at some point in the future.
Orange closes down their email services
Orange exists to this day, but to my surprise, they closed the EresMas and OrangeMail email domains some months ago. If you can read Spanish, here is the official announcement, and here is an excellent article describing how many Spaniards had email addresses from their ISPs back in the early 2000s. Names like EresMas, Wanadoo, Mixmail are now historic names and a legacy of the old internet in Spain. While my old email accounts were mostly spam honeypots and had been so for decades, I’m a bit sad that I will never be able to log in to them ever again, and maybe rescue my very first interactions with online folks. I know there’s nothing of major importance there, but it feels like losing some dusty and bad quality photos from your childhood, if you know what I mean. A lesson to be learned: nothing in the internet will be forever, and you should choose an established email provider like Gmail, Hotmail, etc over an email service from an ISP, which might get merged or bought out later down the line.
What were your early internet adventures like? Have you had similar experiences to mine? Reach out if you did!