The suggestions for email addresses if yours was already taken used to include what you entered plus the last two digits of your birth year. I wonder how many people born in 1988 followed that advice and now deeply regret it.
Pretty sure just yesterday I saw a Lemmy comment bemoaning that 88 had been co-opted for exactly this reason.
Wait what are all you talking about? 88 just means shit like hugs and kisses or good luck.
The link you gave provides you with the answer. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/88_(number)#In_neo-Nazism
Let's not let neonazis take culturally common shit like the okay sign, thumbs up, or literal numbers please.
Let's seize these concepts back, comrades! We will redistribute them back to the people!
Unfortunately, my first email address was @geocities.com.
Godspeed, you ugly collection of websites.
Mine is @aol.com and I'm afraid I'm gonna have to change emails for every single service I've ever used one day 🫠
The first part of my email has remained unchanged since about then. I've gone through various services though. AOL, Earthlink, Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, and now Proton.
I also have a first.last@gmail address I keep for anything more formal (resume).
Bet you get a ton of email intended for other people?
"what is this 'email address' it's asking for"
"dunno, just write your name and then @aol.com"
Last year my email address - initialslastname@gmail.com - was added to the group list for a bunch of old ladies in England. First I was advised of my spot on the flower roster for the church, then I got someone's holiday photos, a reminder that Gerald's birthday was on the 9th, a lovely eCard congratulating me on my wedding anniversary... on and on.
I tried deleting them but they kept coming, and I worried about all the cool stuff initialslastname was missing out on. I sent an email to the whole group saying stop it & got a heartfelt apology and promises to correct it, but the emails have kept on coming - they all have me in their address books now. If I wasn't so lazy it would be a good incentive to move fully to my proton address.
Tmy name is just common enough to never be available anywhere, until Outlook.com addresses were new. Got firstlast@outlook magically. Really just one guy in Australia though it seems that doesn't realize he's not getting any of those emails. I figure that his actual email is probably something like first.last@outlook and he misses the dot sometimes.
I have an uncommon but not unique name and I have firstlast@gmail.com. As far as I know, others with my name usually include a middle initial in their email address but they sometimes forget it. I've gotten family event plans, car maintenance reminders, digital receipts, contractor quotes, and even once added to a daycare group (that one I did reach out to the coordinator to let them know and then removed myself from the group).
Lol, same. Although my Gmail is starting to become kindo of spammy now & I might have to cut my losses again.
Fun facts, I own a domain name and created a new email address.
I'm currently considering making it my main email address.
Also a good reason to leave outlook and gmail.
Note that if you let your domain lapse and someone else registers it afterwards, that person will also gain control over your e-mail address (and likely all accounts associated with it, if they are not secured with an additional factor of authentication / recovery).
Wow, are you serious? That's crazy!
What if I delete everything if I ever let my domain lapse?
In the same time, it is the name of my company, I assume I will keep it forever until I die.
As long as you're very thorough about removing any linked connection from your expired e-mail, you should be OK. That includes all accounts that you registered using this e-mail, as well as all e-mail contacts that you've built up using that account.
Yeah, i get it.
An email address is a very important tool that is the root of anything online.
If you start using an email address, everything else becomes attached to it.
Last I tried that was over 20 years ago, and I was getting bombed with 13,000 spam emails an hour.
Though I'd imagine privately-hosted spam filtering has gotten much better since then.
Use Fastmail with your own domain. You're a glutton for punishment if you try to run your own email server.
That's a good idea because then you can always change your mail provider without changing your email address on all websites
I think the person was saying it's a good idea to have your own domain because with a gmail.com address, you're stuck with Gmail. With your own, you can change providers any time by setting up your addresses at the new provider and updating the mail records to point to them. Boom! New email provider, same addresses.
Yeah, that's what I think too.
You simply have to make sure that you keep the domain name and make the transition from gmail to the new address smooth.
Everything else is just technical details. Not a problem for me.
I used to work for a retail company that signed people up for preferred customer accounts, and there are largely 2 kinds of emails: Robert.Layfield@gmall.com and BigMon3yT_Bone69@hotmall.com
It is possible and even good to change your email. I wrote an email service called Port87, and changed my email twice during the process. It really sucks how much work it is, but it’s worth it. Every email service that’s been around for decades just sucks. They survive on the fact that it’s hard to change your email.
Yeah the hardest part is going around and updating your address with sites you use.
Every time I've done it, I've also put an auto forward on my old address, and a label or other alert for anything that comes through from the old so I can go update it or block that address from auto forwarding.
@hotmail.com, @yahoo.com, my own host, @gmail.com, @protonmail.com. Seems like I make a new one every decade or so.
Almost exactly the same, except my proton is @proton.me.
And I've have my Hotmail since a year or two after it started, so almost 30 years.
My email is only 30 years old because it was initially created solely to keep my everquest guild data handy
I still use my old email but it’s been relegated to “email that goes in websites I don’t trust”
No, that one still gets all the spam. Was in some breaches. I use it for sketchy sites.
I lost my original one, because I didn't know shit about secure passwords, and never bothered to try to have it recovered.
I have 5 emails, the most used and first being made when i was 7 or 8 and contains my real name
Use email aliasing service or custom domain and get a different email address for each account/website
I still use my first email address.
It gets flooded with spam, so I use those scam emails as my database of real scammer numbers to call, then I fire up my VM and fuck with them
I got a Gmail when it came out back when Hotmail was 10MB and gmail had a size that you could see grow on top. It is just my name shortened.
I think that's his kids name, actually.
Including "atpersand Gmaildotcom". It's dignified. Can't just say "at". Like a pleb.
It's like only rich people naming their kid Matthew instead of Mathew. Poor folk can't afford the second "T", but like to pronounce it like they're a "someone" anyway.
