The first email address I ever had came from Hotmail. My first website came from Geocities. I’m not proud. Just writing that makes me feel itchy. I cling to the excuse that these were early technologies, and the only ones available to a deprived young upstart whose sole connection to the nascent 1996 internet was to sneak into Future Publishing’s offices on a Saturday. I should be forgiven.
Thankfully, Geocities is gone, which makes things easier. I’m saved ever again seeing the HTML mockeries I made when I was 15. If you’re looking for a confusing (and definitely under construction) monochrome tribute to Radiohead guitarist Johnny Greenwood’s RSI (not the man, just his wrist ailments) you’re out of luck.
Stop looking – it’s gone, or at least I hope it hasn’t been preserved by any of the noble Geocities archiving operations. Hotmail hasn’t gone, but my patronage has.
I grabbed a Gmail account as soon as one became available to me. I had an early invite, which meant that I was the coolest kid on the internet at a time when a Hotmail address was still attached to the worst kind of techno-dolt. A user of Hotmail was invariably the sort of person who couldn’t get a proper email address, just like a user of AOL was the sort of person who chose their ISP based on nothing but the number of pretty floppy disks that had been forced into their clammy hands.
People with Gmail access sneered at the Hotmail plebs back then, and from a personally intolerant perspective nothing has changed. Free is fashionable, Gmail use is as commonplace – more so, even – than Hotmail once was, but I still look down my nose at it like a well-to-do Victorian gentleman would at his filthy staff. Hotmail is low class, dirty. It might have diseases. It’s certainly not touching any of my things – it might contaminate them with those awful grimy fingers.
I can’t shake that 1996 attitude. Even my Luddite father has migrated to Googleland. Why haven’t you, Mr Hotmail User? You’re slow, and you’re wrong. I’m right. Everyone looks at me, with my Gmail address, and thinks “Oh, what an excellent fellow, he’s using the connoisseur’s choice of mail provider. This chap is quite something!”. They look at you, swallow down a mouthful of bile, and shed a single tear for your ineptitude.
I have since transferred this awful and quite unfounded xenophobia on to people who use their ISP’s bolt-on email addresses. Using virginmedia.net or sky.com? I see your address. It makes me sad. It makes me think that you don’t know any better, and just went with the first thing you were offered. Psh. You haven’t gone out and spent the pence it would cost to buy your own domain and mask that ISP advert? You couldn’t even go as far as Google before signing your life away and telling all your friends about your exciting new email address, leaving you henceforth unable to change it? You disgust me.
(As an aside, I own a domain and have it redirecting mail to my Gmail mailbox, but I never give out the domain address, always the Gmail. This is a hypocritical nail in my argument’s coffin.)
The worst thing about my horrible attitude? I’m sure Hotmail is brilliant nowadays. @hotmail.com doesn’t mean you’re a chump, it just means you use Hotmail; easily accessible, well supported, not likely to go away any time soon (barring server disasters like the one that recently emptied thousands of inboxes). @aol.com doesn’t mean you’ve just been released from a nice, safe walled garden for online dribblers into the wild world of the proper internet, like it did in 1996, it just means you’re on AOL. Nothing wrong with that. I clearly need to change my thinking. Perhaps I should start by changing my email address.