What was your first email program?
 

Sixto's thread on Yahoo got me thinking about the early days of the internet. Does anyone remember the name of their first email program? Pine? Mailx? Xmailtool? Those were my earliest ones.

And in the context of the early internet (only!), did you ever "finger" someone?

Ah the good old days.

Answer 1, Eudora.
Answer 2, yes.

- Peter.

(1) Text email: elm. GUI email: Eudora. I still use mutt, and occasionally mailx for testing things, to this day.
(2) Yes.

(But has anyone here ever "talk"ed or "ytalk"ed?)

WebTV, ca 1998.

I predicted back then that the internet and television would eventually merge at some point in the future. It has happened.

[/breaking arm, patting self on back]

Elm! I forgot about that one. Ha ha. Elm or pine on a monochrome CRT. Whoohooo!

I used to "finger" addresses to see who was available to "talk." Those early commands were short and sweet.

Hotmail in 1997 and I got it at a post office in Holland. Had no clue what email was but friends told me I needed it. Mail is what you get at the post office so that's where I went to get it and the guy behind the counter was so friendly to help me set it up on one of their terminals. What did I know. When things become more serious I started to use Eudora.

Used hotmail - and their web interface.

I first had an email address ca. 1993 or so. I worked for a software developer at the time and I think it was some proprietary system or another that one of the geeks set up. In 1995 I went to work for a different developer and as I recall we used an early version of Outlook, before it was called Outlook. Microsoft Mail, maybe. Then they screwed around with a Lotus Notes application that was supposed to do much more than mail, but it was a fiasco.

I'm still using mine. Its an old @mac.com email that my parents got me when I went off to college in 1999. Any time I need to go to the genius bar at Apple for anything their eyes light up because of my email :D

I think I used Nutscrape and Eudora and Outlook Express variously with late OS 6 thru 9 and have used Mail.app with OSX ever since. No need for a third party client. I only used webmail for throwaway addresses historically but now use google for lots of things, esp. financial and shopping. Gmail is easy to set up to POP through to my mail.app client that I only have to use the web interface if I'm looking for an old mail message.

I started out with elm in 1996 or so.

Pine initially, then on to Eudora. Was working for Qualcomm when they acquired the rights to Eudora from some university... along with several of the engineers responsible for its creation.

Compuserve where you had to dialup a telephone number and read the e-mail online.

I do recall the program screwing itself on occasion and there was a very specific way to get your old data back but Compuserve was of no help whatsoever. There were some folks who would help people outside of Compuserve and a couple of them developed the program and knew all the ways the data could be recovered.

Soon after that, I found Outlook and was positively amazed that an e-mail message would automatically arrive at this computer without the need to call Compuserve and without the need to leave all the messages on their servers.

That was a long time ago.............although I sill use the Compuserve e-mail address as the primary. It's very convenient as ".csi" now.

Gmail can speak IMAP as can mail.app, so you can download all of your old email to mail.app. You can actually search for email internally or using Spotlight then.

Is it numeric? I had a Compuserve address that was something like 7xxxx.xxxx@compuserve.com (where x were octal digits only).