[52-6F-62]

> 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)

[glenneroo]

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 [e-mail].