A random thought occurred to me today when an email to a friend bounced back. We seem to change email addresses far more frequently than phone numbers, physical addresses, or most other contact methods. Looking in my GMail account, the oldest email I still have goes back to 6/18/2004. But for email addresses, one of the addresses that I still regularly check was first in use all the way back to September of 2000.
So what’s YOUR stats for
a) Oldest email you have sitting around that you can easily access without pulling out a backup tape or archive CD?
b) The oldest email address that you still regularly check?
While 5 years for an email and 8.5 years for an address seem like a long time, think of how short those are compared to carvings in a rock…
I have a yahoo email address that I still check daily – tho it’s no longer my primary – and I know I was using it in early 1997…
August 2004 in my gmail… but it must be longer because my oldest email in my mailbox is part of a thread while working with a client that started long before then. Maybe back in the original gmail days, I was deleting email.
I have Yahoo and Netscape (now aim.com) mailboxes that go back a ways, probably to the late ’90s. I don’t use them as primaries, but I still use them occasionally. You raise some interesting questions about social trends unique to email