Email Evolution

It amuses me the way I have changed my email IDs and services as they have evolved (as I did I). My first ever email ID was back in 1998 when we got our first PC, a Pentium. We were very proud because while people had 486s (the very few people who did have PCs back in those days), we had the new generation Pentium and it boasted a very high RAM of 64MB and an unheard of 4GB hard disk (Who'd ever heard of a GB back then? We believed that that HDD was enough to last us till we existed. How wrong we were!). Back then the internet was pretty rudimentary in India and VSNL was the only provider. I remember the day we got our student account, the unix-based text version. It came with Unix-based mail ID and luckily my bro knew how to work it and pretty soon we were "internet savvy" with the black and white text screens. I was truly proud. The account was in my name because I would remain a student longer than my bro. The ID they'd given us was jayap. :) That was the only internet account in my name.

A year or more later, we got our first TCP/IP account - ramp. And it remained ramp till i was in India last before we migrated to Hathway and it became parasuram. But this post isn't about the internet evolution in me. Its about the email evolution. As with most others of my day and age (I speak like a well-lived veteran), Hotmail was my first email account. A storage space of an "unreachable" 2MB. Who ever heard of emails needing anymore space than that? I still retain my first email ID jollyjaya though my frequency of mailing/checking that account has all but died. And the phenomenon that MSN Messenger was back in college is unforgettable. All of us HCE-ites were MSN savvy and after spending close to 9 hours with each other through the day, we still found the time and energy to actually go online and chat with the very same people. No wonder our parents were perpetually pissed. Not to mention that those days we had just dial-up and there was no question of sneaking online (because of the shrill hisses of the modem) or staying too much on it because of the stupendous phone bills incurred. Indeed, till we got our cable internet, I have been blamed as the root cause of all high phone bills at home.

Then we all got our Yahoo! Ids. But the Yahoo Messenger never kicked in as a favorite as far as I was in India (Now I can't believe we chose MSN over Yahoo). And the Yahoo emails offered more storage space of 5MB. Phenomenal improvement, we all thought and religiously created IDs in every server we'd heard of. Rediffmail gained brief popularity but never really kicked in with me. And then came the phenomenon that still maintains monopoly on my email usage. The God of all Emails - GMail on April 1, 2004. And with it came an unheard of 1GB free storage space. Surely they're kidding? No... they were just starting their dominance. For next, they bought their In Mail chatting, a huge step in sculpting GMail's Email monopoly. And the fact that you couldn't have an account unless you were invited only made it more intriguing. In fact it was very recently that GMail paved way for anyone and everyone to create themselves and ID on their server. Then on April 1st, 2005, they came up with the concept of ever-increasing storage space. This was surely a joke? A Fool's Day ploy? The joke's on anyone who thought so coz GMail is still counting. Along the way they came up with GTalk, yet another utility in close competition to the Messengers. With GMail still counting and the other mail providers trying to provide some competition, we are yet to wait and watch. As consumers, it can only get better for us.