I got my first email address aged 10 so I could communicate with my older sister who was taking a year out and travelling Australia and New Zealand.
The experience is vividly memorable, as my mum (and to be fair, me neither!) had no clue how one got email addresses and told me she thought you probably had to phone someone up.
A very kind and helpful teacher helped guide me through the signnup process to get (if I remember rightly!) a whopping 2MB of storage on Talk21.
Talk21 was BT’s free email service thing :
talk21 was created to help everyone in the UK to be able to keep in touch in the 21st century. This part of BT’s Millenium Programme. talk21 is enabling the Government to meet its pledge to provide an email account for everyone in the UK over 9 years old.
With Lavabit and Silent Mail closures stuck in my recent memory, today I received this:
> This summer, we’re simplifying our email product range and we’ll be closing some of our email services on 16 September 2013.
>
> This means that your [email protected] email address will stop working after that date.
Apparently, if I wanted to pay them ££ or get Broadband from BT (LOL NO!) I could keep it, but since I’ve got any remaining email, and I haven’t actually used it since, about, 2004, I think it’s wise to let it lapse.
My current email infrastructure is better, currently in a hybrid self-managed setup… soon to be more self-managed I hope.
Goodbye Talk21. Thanks for connecting me to people back in the day. Dream of sunsets on calm seas.