'Posh' EMail Addresses

[andyoxon]

If you have a specific provider eMail address, it shows first and foremost that you don't understand how these things work, and are doomed to stay with the ISP or change eMail addresses, with all that entails (including issues recovering passwords etc). You also tie your mast to the provider, and show yourself in their colours. Least posh.

If you use a global provider, nobody will fault you (@gmail) but equally it leaves you with one provider. Average posh, not really good enough for a business.

If you have your own domain, you can use global provider addresses too, and if that address gets overburdened by spam just drop it. Looks best, easy to work with global providers such as gmail. Poshest.

All of that only makes a difference to those who understand.

For our very first ISP contract we had @virgin.net as an email for a few years, and then learnt the hard way when we changed ISP.  Virgin gave us something like 2wks grace before the address totally died.  So we're on gmail these day - which is great.  Actually still googlemail, but that's because I can't be bothered trwling through all our online accounts changing the details to gmail.  I helped set my Father up with a gmail acct, when he changed to btinternet for this reason, but he doesn't use it...

[Ham]

For those reading this and wondering how to manage other domain eMails, it is very easy in gmail.

First, register your domain, and get all mail redirected to a gmail account.

Then, go into gmail, choose settings, Accounts and Import.

There you will see "Add another eMail address you own", use this to add your new domain.

After gmail has confirmed you own it by sending a mail to which you click to confirm, you will be able to send mail from gmail with your own domain.

You can choose any address to be your default for new emails. The normal way gmail is set up it will respond to a mail with the domain that receives is. So, if you receive a mail addressed to me@posh.com, it will send a reply from posh.com without further intervention, you can change this on a case by case basis if you want to.

Repeat as many times as you have domains.

You may find it useful to use gmail filters to tag incoming mail with a domain and put it into its own folder.

[rafletcher]

I would look with suspicion at anyone who hadn't got their own domain as it's so straight forwards these days.

It is snobbery

Agreed.

[Pancho]

I was a FidoNet boy.

IIRC, there was a system that was a cross between email and a forum. Really can't remember the details or my ID.

Do remember my mother getting a massive phone bill, though - and having my acoustic coupler confiscated.

[MattH]

FidoNet, that's taking me back a bit. I don't remember my ID either though I tended to access via AmiBee (a weird hybrid board that specialised in Amiga Amateur Radio operators and beekeeping). I did have a proper internet email address earlier than that though, in the 80s, a .ac.uk academic one that I no longer remember either.

[Pancho]

If it was 80s, it was probably a JANET account - with the address the wrong way around (ie uk.ac.etc). I managed to lay my hands on an account despite being about 15 and never having set foot in a university.

[rogerzilla]

Mine is roger@<name of small Viking characters we used to sketch at school>.com

[robgul]

Way back, when I worked for the UK bit of AT&T we had e-mail addresses that were in the format     !name    (i.e. an exclamation mark at the front - although they called it a "bang" )

It was an internal e-mail BUT somehow linked to the outside world's, then, primitive e-mail network ... I can recall having in 1993 an early clamshell  notebook PC (an AT&T Safari ... made, I think, by NCR) - with a modem that plugged in and ran at about 300baud on a dial up - with a mono screen of course.   Those were the days!

Rob

[geraldc]

My first email used telnet or dumb terminals (although technically we apparently had emails at school on the BBC micros, but they couldn't reach further than within the school so didn't count), my brother had eudora on his PC as he was a post grad with his own office, so I would forward attachments to my brother, as on telnet they would show up as pages of "mime aodfjd fw42-049eojanslf " or some such. My brother would then look at the photo and then describe what he'd seen in an email. As most of the email attachments I was sent were from school mates, and I'd gone to an all male school, it was predominantly pr0n.

[David Martin]

Best domain name I came across was a norwegian advertising company. yes.no. I was wondering if there was a maybe@yes.no email address..

[MattH]

Thinking about dumb terminal email, my first email-like system at home (in the very early 90s, before Demon made dial up Internet easily available) was AX25 radio based, using a 1200 baud packet radio terminal node control connected to a 432.65MHz transceiver and an RS232 green screen dumb terminal. I could send and receive email to anywhere in the world on the network, but it could take a day or two for emails to make their way across to the US as they bounced around the UK on shared-access 1k2 links. These were made even slower as collisions and hence retries were common as not all stations could hear all other stations, and there were quite long randomised listening periods between sending packets. Eventually the mail would  making its way to a HF or satellite gateway across the pond. My email address was the rather memorable <mycallsign>@GB7ODM.#16.GBR.EU

A friendly blinking orange light on the tnc would tell me that there was email waiting in it's internal memory. I powered this up a few years ago, and found some emails still sitting in there (battery backed up SRAM) that had been sent to me by my brother in the mid-90s. Looking at the house I lived in at the time on streetview, it's still got the UHF antenna on the roof pointing towards his old house (and, conveniently, also GB7ODM's direction).

[Feanor]

( Ingoring closed dial-in networks eg Edinburgh Uni which I used to access at 300 bps to play Zork-type games... )

My first Internet provider was Compuserve too.
This was using a US Robotics Sportster External 28,800 modem.
I had an e-mail address of the form 12345.67890@compuserve.com for a couple of years before they allowed you to use your own name.
They had their own horrid propreitary software and 'walled garden'.
If you were smart enough, you could figure out how to use their proprietary dialler to set up the PPP session, and then use an unrestricted browser.
Nutscrape Navigator was my first one.

Then, the 'freeserve' thing came along, and gave free dial-in access for only the cost of the call.
There were several companies providing similar things.
Many of them were the same company behind the scenes!

I was with freeserve for a few years, before ADSL came along.

Then, I was in the pilot roll-out of ADSL in Aberdeen.
And amongst the first to throw away the USB 'Frog' modem, and set up a proper router, which in those days was verbotten, or at least deeply frowned upon.

The kids these days, they just have it so easy.

[drossall]

Oh, the first email I used was on an aggregator's closed (non-Internet) system (two different ones actually). They were used for communicating among database providers, such as ourselves, and the aggregator's staff. Then, as SMTP and other mail became available, they put in an X.400 gateway. Took about 10 tries to get someone's address right through that, and there wasn't much of an address book, so I'm not sure you could store the right version when you'd figured it out...

Eventually the whole thing changed over to SMTP formats, and then we started to get our own email server.

And then CompuServe as a way of getting mail on the move (no way to connect back to the server at the office), and then Freeserve for home use. As above, I've still got both those addresses working.

[Jules]

( Ingoring closed dial-in networks eg Edinburgh Uni which I used to access at 300 bps to play Zork-type games... )

My first Internet provider was Compuserve too.
This was using a US Robotics Sportster External 28,800 modem.
I had an e-mail address of the form 12345.67890@compuserve.com for a couple of years before they allowed you to use your own name.
They had their own horrid propreitary software and 'walled garden'.
If you were smart enough, you could figure out how to use their proprietary dialler to set up the PPP session, and then use an unrestricted browser.
Nutscrape Navigator was my first one.

Then, the 'freeserve' thing came along, and gave free dial-in access for only the cost of the call.
There were several companies providing similar things.
Many of them were the same company behind the scenes!

I was with freeserve for a few years, before ADSL came along.

Then, I was in the pilot roll-out of ADSL in Aberdeen.
And amongst the first to throw away the USB 'Frog' modem, and set up a proper router, which in those days was verbotten, or at least deeply frowned upon.

The kids these days, they just have it so easy.

We must be related. Posh 300bps corporate email in the 80's

300 bps army-surplus acoustic coupler for home use. Me and my good mate John (Imperial college tech guy) used to dialup IC and spend out evenings traversing JANET to find interesting stuff.

100025.1012@compuserve.com

Early adopter of £10/month Demon Internet and that crazy PC-DOS software that I think was originally designed for packet radio.

1200/75 for Prestel

Have Usenet posts back to 1994 on Linux boards.

US Robotics 2400bps modem with lots of lights

2x64 kbs ISDN circuit - still got the box for that under my desk

Still got a Hotmail account -  canned_lunchmeat@hotmail.com - my email /dev/null

Was beta tester for BT London ADSL rollout in 1999. Still got the box for that under my desk

[Basil]

Don't know when I sent my first e-mail, but I do know that I announced the birth of #1 son to our LA office in 1984 via Telecom Gold.

[Jaded]

Telecom Gold was my first too.

[MattH]

Don't know when I sent my first e-mail, but I do know that I announced the birth of #1 son to our LA office in 1984 via Telecom Gold.

So you were one of the first to do this?   

[PaulF]

Back in the very early 90's a consultant that i was working with announced one Monday morning that he'd set up an e-mail system for us that he'd built in Excel Very clever stuff using macros etc.!

He was a little disappointed when someone pointed out that we didn't need e-mail as we all sat together and could talk to each other. But looking at most offices I work in he was probably ahead of the time

[Bledlow]

... I can recall having in 1993 an early clamshell  notebook PC (an AT&T Safari ... made, I think, by NCR) - with a modem that plugged in and ran at about 300baud on a dial up - with a mono screen of course.   Those were the days!

Rob

Oh yes. From 1993 to 1995 I was doing out of hours support of financial systems, running on mainframes, with a Toshiba laptop (pooled, not one each: I only had it on days when I was on call) via a 9.6K dial-up modem. The screen was small enough that it might be called a notebook these days. State of the art!

[Basil]

Don't know when I sent my first e-mail, but I do know that I announced the birth of #1 son to our LA office in 1984 via Telecom Gold.

So you were one of the first to do this?   

 

[robgul]

Nobody has mentioned Prestel or Videotex/Viewdata yet ....

Prestel was really only the WWW but with a clunkier indexing system and coarse teletext graphics - BUT it did its job .... travel agents used it to book holidays, car dealers used it to track stock of cars ... and building societies used it to sell the dreaded "endowment policy linked mortgage" products (I was involved in a project with Mr Zilla's employer)

The one thing that hasn't happened (although it seems to be creeping up on us now) is the total demise of printed newspapers as predicted when I worked in printing, in about 1974. The plan was that everyone would have a printer in the home and print on demand ... that was pretty stunning, bear in mind that "consumer fax" didn't really come in until the mid/late 1970s (qv Xerox Telecopier ... you put the document on a drum to send it!)

Rob

[fuzzy]

My first ever e mail address is my current work address.

My first personal address was forename.surname<at>tiscali.net (or was it co.uk or.com)

It is currently forename.surname<at>sky.com

Richard and his drones missed a trick. I wish it was forename.surname<at>sky.net 

I also have gallopthemaggot<at>anothergenericprovider.something

[matthew]

my father has <firstname>@<surname>.<initials> for both him and mum. They are fortunate in that their initials are both country level domains. Unfortunately my initials are not a country level domain so I don't get the same facility.

[Valiant]

Another gripe is when people don't have their names on their email address, I don't mean the actual address, but the friendly name.

I don't mind long email addresses, in this day and age you only need to type it once if you have to type it all.

I think I have 10 email addresses that are currently in active daily use, thank heavens for Gmail and it's ability to send and receive as multiple accounts.

[tiermat]

Families:

People think they're being so clever with: dave@thesurnames.com

I have an irrational hatred of that one!

Bugger, does an thesurnames.org.uk irritate you as much?