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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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..
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.
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.
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.
That still gets used? Probably my eBay account from 2000/2001. First thing I bought from there was a 33.6k external modem lol.
Edit: No, I take that back. I have an even older account on a MUD server from like 1996. It doesn't get used regularly, but I do log in every 6-7 months, randomly, and go on a few runs.
Same. Been using my ebay account since early 1999, literally a quarter of a century. I don't remember if it was the very first, but I know one of my early purchases was a parallel port to ethernet adapter, so I could take my already aging 486SLC/33 laptop to campus and get it on the internet using the Arachne browser. The SLC was basically a 386 on steroids, and it couldn't handle both Windows and Interwebs. I paid for the first few items by mailing off a money order.
I went through the same path. Gmail came to mind first, then eBay, then a MUD I haven't actually played in ages but double check that my account is there now and then.
Possibly my Hotmail, although I'm not 100% sure when I opened it, and I converted it to an Outlook email when that became an option.
Most of the sites I used to use have shut down or migrated to new systems, so my oldest account is most likely my ModTheSims account opened in 2008. I do still use it whenever I'm in the mood for some Sims 2 retail therapy.
I opened my first Gmail account during the private beta (2004). It's not my daily driver account, but I still use it for government stuff like taxes and healthcare. It kinda blows my mind that it's 20 years old.
Gmail since 2002 or something. Steam account if emails don't count.
Edit: Wow account could be older than steam account. I honestly can't remember.
Edit2: Yep, wow account is a 4 years older than my steam. Turns out I lost my first steam account that did not really have any games on it and instead of recovering it I just registered a new one. Doing this research of my own history was a questionable use of my evening but apparently necessary to get it out of my head.
I guess technically that'd be the email account at my employer where I started some decades ago. Before Google and their Gmail was a thing, anyway. Or, livejournal, I guess. ...MySpace... Oof, AOL... Usenet, maybe...
Ebay still shows your start date on your feedback page. Mine dates back to December 1999 and I believe that makes it my oldest still active online account.
My Steam and RuneScape accounts are both over 20 years old, and I still use both regularly. Hell, RuneScape is even available via Steam.
As far as the actual oldest account, I think I have an old Yahoo! Mail account from like… Late 1997? Early 1998? Back when AOL was still sending out free demo discs in the mail.
Probably my yahoo mail account. I've mostly transitioned off it, but a few things still come to it and it predates even my gmail account (which I barely ever use either). Apple ID's Hide My Email ability has basically rendered all the other ones pointless though since I can just generate a new fake email address whenever I want to register for something fishy. I wish phone numbers worked the same way.
Maybe my Gmail account. I made it to play Club Penguin. I still use it when signing up for things.
I have some old forum accounts but I don't use them anymore. I also had a Minecraft account from before the Mojang and Microsoft migrations. That's gone now. :(
My League of Legends and Steam accounts are old too.
Same for me. Helps that it's a pure utility account with no social interaction and no media consumption. There's no real competitor to it where I live, so no alternatives.
I've probably had three different emails associated with it through the years.
Here's a question for everyone who's old enough, what is KOL and what happens to it when you turn a certain age? I've yet to meet or hear of anyone knowing this answer.
Year one Steam account, even has a unique profile badge. It's a little over 20 years old. I only made it because I bought a copy of CS: Condition Zero, and it was needed to play online.
My first one that I still use is my Hotmail account, but now it's just my spam email, but still randomly have to use it to get some login codes and stuff
Technically, my Microsoft account. I created a Hotmail email account around 1997, my first ever online account. At some point, Microsoft merged my Hotmail login with their Microsoft login, and I still use it today; although I've changed the email address to a more current one. Microsoft killed Hotmail a long time ago, in favor of Outlook.
My fark account is old enough to drive in the US. I don't think I really use much of anything that old anymore.
I had facebook from the time when it still required a .edu email, though I quit that. I lost access to my hotmail account years ago after dropping it in favor of gmail. I had IRC accounts going back into the '90s, but I almost never use IRC anymore (and certainly not on those same networks (assuming they even still exist)).
Strangely, the oldest thing I have left is a web hosting account by Strato that I opened around 1999. My dad still uses an e-mail adress he got with his first T-Online account when the internet became available for normal households in Germany in the mid-90s.
My Twitter account is from 2014 and I still use the same one. My youtube account is even older but no idea how old. On places like Reddit and Lemmy I make a new account atleast once a year.
Lots of people mentioning Neopets. I did have an account there but couldn't log back on when I tried a few years back, so I guess my account was deleted (or I've got my login details wrong)
My Yahoo Mail was opened the first week of January, 1998. Would be my Hotmail account, but I made my Yahoo account because Microsoft bought Hotmail, and stopped using Hotmail
Maybe Battle.Net. I might request my account data just to see the creation date now.
Oldest accounts would be AIM and Hotmail had I held onto them. Some friends still use their old Hotmail email and take a lot of crap for it. I still remember my Hotmail password. It was four letters.
Then came FB, Gmail, and Steam all around the same time. I still use Gmail and Steam every day. FB not so much.
My memory is terrible, and it doesn't help that I have the world record for the most sites having signed up for (a very nerdy bragging right I have), but it has to be something like one of the Pokemon MMO's, RuneScape, or Furaffinity (RIP Dragoneer). Most of the old places I've been to are gone one way or another, for example I haven't heard from Postopia since the E3 disaster.
Yahoomail account. Created it in the early 2000s, stopped using it around 2009 when I moved on to newer email providers. I remembered I still had it last year when I got an emai on my recovery email that they will be deleting my account if I don’t login. I somehow was still able to recover it and login after 15 years. Now I just login whenever I get a notification of inactivity. I don’t actually use it for anything anymore.