> email addresses were treated as disposable and temporary from how i remember it before gmail went mainstream.
Not at all. On the consumer level they were typically associated with your ISP account. So you'd get to be <version-of-your-name>@<isp-net.com>
My parents still have the email they set up with the minuscule local cable company in the early 2000's. That's only the second email they've ever had outside of the dialup provider email they had in the late 90's (when internet finally came to our small town)
Works fine until you move and change providers, or as in the case of many of my friends/colleagues, change email addresses due to spam, which is often related to signing up to services which eventually get hacked. I regularly get spam addressed to custom email addresses, one of the first times was adobe28593@mydomain.com.
What was so special about Gmail? Except for the user interface and mailbox size, Hotmail and Yahoo were just as good and people used them for a long time.
thats how it was in my circles until ~05-06.
everyone kept switching emails and used a different address on each service/forum. until gmail came along.
suddenly everyone used their gmail address for everything. and even that got phased out when facebook came along.
The big difference that I remember from gmail was the superior spam filter (other inboxes filled with spam quickly) and better security (everyone with a yahoo mail account had it compromised and started sending spam / virus laden links after a while).
Not at all. On the consumer level they were typically associated with your ISP account. So you'd get to be <version-of-your-name>@<isp-net.com>
My parents still have the email they set up with the minuscule local cable company in the early 2000's. That's only the second email they've ever had outside of the dialup provider email they had in the late 90's (when internet finally came to our small town)