YOU ARE YOUNGER THAN ADRIEN BRODY! BUT OLDER THAN BUFFY

May 5, 2024 3:01 PM

Because of that decision made in Mountain View, we now have a huge accidental archive of our collective past. Awkward flirtations, drunken rants, earnest pleas; friendships fraying or rekindled, personae tried on and discarded, good jokes and bad decisions; every dumb or brilliant or anguished thing we wrote below the subject line — we have an instantly searchable record of it all. To mark the anniversary of this revolution, the editors of New York asked some of our favorite writers to excavate their individual archives and tell us — with dismay or pride or chagrin — what they saw. from How Gmail Became Our Diary [Intelligencer; ungated]
posted by chavenet (27 comments total)

Hooooly shit.

For the first time ever I went looking through my account for emails from May 2004, when I was 22 years old and in my final semester at college. Apparently I got my account on May 13. The first few emails are all joyfully sending messages to people I know saying "heeeyyyyyyy this is my gmail!! Add me to your contact list!!"

The first substantial email is one I sent to myself as a literal journal entry on May 16th which begins: "I lost my wallet today, but [college roommate] is my savior, she loaned me $10. The big question now is whether to use this cash to buy a phone card to call [boyfriend] or save it for the canteen...."

I must have decided to use it for a phone card and skip my meals for the day, because later that same day is this email from my long-distance boyfriend who would go on to become my husband the next year --- and then ex-husband 12 years later, for reasons that are soooooo painfully obvious in this email:

"i'm angry. i cant help it honey. im just losing it at you. what the hell did i apologize for on the phone, i keep thinking. you never take responsibility for your actions. this is the second time you have lost one of your belongings, you also lost your phone last month. i won't yell at someone who is obviously generally responsible and feels obvious remorse. but because of your behaviour, i come up with the conclusion that there is no remorse or willingness to learn.you will always be irresponsible because you cant even apologise for losing your wallet which is no a small matter. i also find your notion that i shouldnt yell at you totally crazy, like you expect me to keep my true self bottled up? thats just bizarre to me. i care about you and thats why i will yell at you when you fuck things up this badly and show no remorse. bye."

Jeez, this is a dark and creepy nostalgia lane to find myself on.
posted by MiraK at 3:47 PM on May 5 [34 favorites]

I first started using my gmail address as a throwaway account, which is why I have an utterly inscrutable username that I now have to painstakingly spell out to everyone I interact with. So the early years of my gmail account aren't that revelatory. However, I do still have a large pile of .MBX and .DBX files going back to 1997, which I periodically open up and scroll through in TextEdit for the express purpose of trying to remember when a specific thing happened long ago. I was 20 years old for the earliest of those. I suppose I should count my blessings that I wasn't savvy enough to download emails from my Pine/Elm days in high school.
posted by mykescipark at 4:28 PM on May 5 [1 favorite]

shan't.

shannnnnnnnnnnnnnn't.

I don't even have a nightmare ex-husband like MiraK's to worry about. My own self is enough.
posted by praemunire at 4:31 PM on May 5 [19 favorites]

Gmail was my first (and still current) grownup email account. Am I satisfied with it? No. Are there better options out there> Most certainly. But as with legacy bank accounts, there's a lot of lethargy to overcome to make a better switch, not enough energy to make the effort, and so here I stay. At least ny account is under my real (and grownup) name.
posted by Capt. Renault at 5:30 PM on May 5 [4 favorites]

The earliest emails I have are from September 11 2001.
posted by bq at 6:54 PM on May 5 [2 favorites]

whoops, looks like that's not true. That was just a quirk of the way my search results displayed.
posted by bq at 7:08 PM on May 5 [3 favorites]

I'm pretty sure that a couple years ago I nuked the earliest ten years of my Gmail acc for this specific reason. I also deleted my blog as best I could bc I don't need to re-read that stuff. Idiotically, about a month ago I did get nostalgic and looked up the blog on the wayback machine. There was a fair amount of stuff in there from 2005 that, well, I am not proud of. That being said, I must have grown as a human being, so that's good. Also good is that my blog was not popular enough to be indexed often, so there are only bits and pieces out there.
posted by Literaryhero at 7:09 PM on May 5 [3 favorites]

I've got a 9000 page PDF of my LJ from 2001-2016. I've thought about excerpting semi-decent entries and turning it into a book. LOL. yeah no, maybe not.

I used to print my emails to read. I also am sad that I don't have any emails pre-gmail anymore (I've been online since 95, so that's a lot of missing emails). OH well.

Creepy AF to think about the power google has now with all that content/data.
posted by symbioid at 7:39 PM on May 5 [2 favorites]

I got my Gmail invite from a mefite, so my mefi account is older than my Gmail archive.

Boy howdy did I have rough edges I'm grateful to you lot for sanding down some.
posted by flabdablet at 8:05 PM on May 5 [2 favorites]

Just thinking about this, my first email was an AOL account which I'd be hard-pressed to remember what the address was, there are certainly no archives of it saved here. I've had my own domain(s) since 1994, and have used outlook or its ancestors for all that time, but I'm not sure I have any elderly PSTs lying around from much before the late 1990s. I should probably be glad I don't. I do have gmail, but have only ever used it as a "throw-away" for registering for things online which I didn't want cluttering up my main mail. Now it's a "bridge" from my phone to my desktop since I don't do any real work on my phone, nor will I. (I send myself emails with notes via gmail from my phone when I want to remind myself to do something on the "real" computer.)
posted by maxwelton at 8:47 PM on May 5 [1 favorite]

I've had a Yahoo account for ages, but due to tech crap that makes no sense to me, some work/governmental agencies now complain they get a bounceback on it. This has forced me to use my Gmail account that I was forced to get, which I don't like, don't want to use, and has a very long username on it because every other permutation of my name was taken and that means people have to spell it correctly. I hate how Gmail operates, I hate that it keeps everything, I hate all of the click-throughing and all the other crap, and I do not want to make it my main email. Unfortunately, since this awful bounceback thing is not being fixed, I may be stuck having to make it my main, AND I DON'T WANNA.
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:56 PM on May 5 [2 favorites]

I actually have email archives going back to the late 90s. Includes correspondence with my ex wife, my late parents, and much more stuff I don't care to revisit. I should nuke it all. Can't quite bring myself to. Like the old answerphone machine that has the last recording of Dad's voice on it - can't bear to listen to it, can't bear to throw it away.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 10:55 PM on May 5 [5 favorites]

Unfortunately, I've accidentally deleted a couple of years from my gmail account. But I often use it for going back to see what happened at different times. I find it useful. We think we remember stuff, but we really don't at all. We create narratives of the past that fit with our present, and as a person with mental health issues, the narratives I have created aren't always useful.
posted by mumimor at 12:04 AM on May 6 [3 favorites]

I recently helped a friend resurrect their grandfather's mac se/30.

When it came alive, the first email was a spam email. The second email was an article about Netanyahu.

Kinda wish he'd cleaned up his computer.
posted by constraint at 2:10 AM on May 6 [1 favorite]

Apparently I started using Gmail on April 21, 2004. I've kept that same account ever since.

I met my future spouse very soon after that, and it was initially a long-distance relationship so I have the entire archive of us first getting to know each other. It is a bit like a suitcase of old letters. There's nostalgia, there's beauty, there's hopefulness and also awkwardness. Sometimes you read a bit of an old email, written by you, and it seems like a slightly different version of your current self. The old self is going on about something which obviously was important to them, but in retrospect wasn't really important at all. The reverse is also true where old-you mentions some small detail and you think - wow, you don't know the half of it. The world is going to change under your feet.
posted by vacapinta at 4:19 AM on May 6 [7 favorites]

Back in the day i figured everyone would have their own domain, so I registered one combining my wife and I's last names. So now I have to spell out my entire email. But at least I'm not beholden to Google for that.
posted by rikschell at 4:44 AM on May 6 [2 favorites]

Mine go back to 1996. I was able to import my pre-Gmail inbox into Gmail when my first ISP folded.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 6:27 AM on May 6 [2 favorites]

I actually have email archives going back to the late 90s.

Which reminds me, I have some old Eudora archives somewhere ("doo-DOOO-doo!"). Must be from my first laptop, so...mid-90s.
posted by praemunire at 7:28 AM on May 6 [1 favorite]

I had a yahoo email that was fine, but I put in a fake birthdate, and they wouldn't let me change it to apply to be in a fantasy football league, which required you to be 18+ years old. Apparently birthdate was really important to yahoo coding. Surprise surprise they aren't an important company anymore.

So I switched to gmail -it's fine. My wife has hotmail - it's 2024, and they still put all the email from our kid's schools in junkmail, but they make sure she gets 20 emails a day from Kohls. There is no way to fix that.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:44 AM on May 6 [2 favorites]

My wife’s gmail spontaneously emptied itself a few months ago and she was weirdly okay with it. I’d have been devastated.

Nobody from real life emails me anymore but it’s fun to look back to the time people used to do so. Social media messages feel more ephemeral.
posted by The Monster at the End of this Thread at 7:54 AM on May 6 [2 favorites]

I have a hard drive with my email from 1992-2001 on it. If I send it to drive recovery they might be able to recover it. Maybe someday I’ll do that. Or, I’ll feed it to a drive shredder. I don’t think we thrive when we accumulate, and I wish that I’d known that sooner, before I accumulated (checks) 9,162 unread messages, much less the untold gigabytes of email since all time. It’s so tough to find what to delete. No one will want my email history once I’m gone. I don’t even want it now. But pruning it haphazardly is a risk, right?

..right?
posted by Callisto Prime at 12:25 PM on May 6 [2 favorites]

shannnnnnnnnnnnnnn't.

Yeah honestly, just remembering anything that happened to me before, like, ten minutes ago is agonizing enough. I don't really need to revisit it in text form.

But it's probably a fun exercise for people who haven't been just completely incapable of functioning like normal, non-horrifying embarrassments of humanity for their entire lives. WHAT IS THAT LIKE EVEN?
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 2:31 PM on May 6 [3 favorites]

No clue. I've just come to expect horrific embarassment as part and parcel of interacting with any other person, so it's normal for me now.
posted by flabdablet at 5:39 PM on May 6 [1 favorite]

Now I've remembered that I also have my Dad's email going back years. Do I want to have a look? I think I probably don't. Am I going to get rid of or wipe his old PC? Also no.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 6:50 PM on May 6 [1 favorite]

Some of my earliest inbox entries in my Gmail account from 2004 (I was a sophomore in college) are requests/invites from a site called TheFacebook. I wonder what happened to that place....
posted by theartandsound at 9:12 PM on May 6 [2 favorites]

If I wanna remember what an idiot I was 24 years ago I can just go to the last page of my Metafiler comments.
posted by straight at 9:13 PM on May 6 [6 favorites]

I can't remember when I got my gmail, so I went ahead and cracked open at an arbitrary period of mid-2005: found some fanfiction written by my college freshman self and immediately closed the tab. Some things don't need to be revisited.
posted by oc-to-po-des at 10:54 PM on May 7