Ask HN: What are your oldest "online" accounts still in use?

[throwaway_08932]

I logged into GameFAQs the other day, and noticed I'd created my account in 1999.

After some poking around my password manager, the only other account I could find still "in use" was an eBay account that I also created in 1999.

I felt a small sense of wonder at having still-functional accounts that are 25 years old.

What are your oldest accounts? What do they still do for you?

[solardev]

My Microsoft login is still a Hotmail account, and I still use my same eBay account from way back then too. There's also a forum I've been a part of since I was a kid, and I'm nearly 40 now.

My favorite account I used to have was [e-mail], back when they dabbled in consumer ISPs (unlimited dialup!). Sadly, they discontinued that service after a while.

I used to have really old Steam, Amazon, Slashdot, Facebook, and reddit accounts too, but deleted them all for various reasons.

[Spare_account]

In case you're interested in finding out the exact age of your Microsoft account: A few years ago I opened a support ticket with Microsoft about how old my account was and they were able to tell me the date my account was created. In my case, it was 22nd June 1998.

[gaws]

> There's also a forum I've been a part of since I was a kid, and I'm nearly 40 now.

Which forum?

[ylee]

My `pobox.com` account was created in the mid-1990s. Active the whole time.

My college email addresses were created three decades ago and are active today. I could switch back to using one as my primary email address everywhere, and do use it in some places, but the pobox address became the primary one after graduation, before the college address was reenabled.

My Amazon account was also created in the mid-1990s. I applaud the company for making complete purchase histories still available.

I am not sure when my `yahoo.com` account was created but it was in the late 1990s. I have never ever used the address anywhere. It gets lots of spam.

My eBay account was created in the late 1990s. Active the whole time.

I have a low single-digit Slashdot account.

I also have a valid ICQ account from the 1990s, I think, but never used it.

[fullstop]

> I am not sure when my `yahoo.com` account was created but it was in the late 1990s. I have never ever used the address anywhere. It gets lots of spam.

Mine has been around since October of 1996. It, too, gets lots of spam.

> I have a low single-digit Slashdot account.

A friend of mine has slashdot uid of 6. He must have known the original crew.

[dopheide]

Damn, I thought I was doing good with a 3-digit Slashdot id.

[weinzierl]

I still have a DynDNS (later Dyn and then acquired by Oracle) account.

It is a bit funny since the "Dyn (company)" Wikipedia page[1] says the company was founded in 2001, but I'm pretty sure I had this account already when years started with 19.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyn_(company)

EDIT: Not an online account, but I only had a single mobile phone number my entire life.

[gwbas1c]

I attended a talk by the founders in early 2004. It was a non-profit hobby project, so it may have existed in some form before 2001.

[xn]

My PayPal referral link no longer works for some reason: https://secure.paypal.x.com/refer/pal=cwarden%40mediaone.net

[_fw]

X.com points to Twitter now, so I imagine that’s why it’s broken

(Unless I’m pointing out the obvious unsaid joke)

[runjake]

Some of my MUD accounts from 1991-1992, which I still occasionally log into from time to time, out of morbid curiousity. They're inexplicably still online, but effectively ghost towns.

Other than that, probably my Gmail account from the beta days.

[quantxx]

A younger one here. What's MUD?

[throwaway_08932]

My last ghost-town MUD died a few years ago :'(

http://lostunicorn.org/

[Croftengea]

Oh, I didn't know MUDs are still a thing. Memories...

[clucas]

swmud.org still gets active players :) Oldest player accounts are from '96 though, I think there was a big player wipe back in the mid-90s.

[thetimbanks]

I also have an eBay account that I still use from 1999.

The other one that people seem to be impressed with is my Netflix account is from 2003. I was ordering DVDs in college and it blew people's minds that I was renting DVDs through the mail at that time. I tried to buy their stock back when they tried splitting the company into two entities. I think the stock was like $5 at the time. Unfortunately it was a lot harder to buy stock back then.

[jghn]

I wouldn't have thought about Netflix as the service is so fundamentally different today than it was back then. I first signed up in 2003.

[tkgally]

My personal website [1] has been hosted by Hostway.com since 1999. I still edit the HTML files by hand in a text editor, and I upload them by dragging them between the windows of an FTP client.

[1] https://gally.net

[severine]

...and it's responsive, interesting, and up to date. Congratulations and thanks for the link!

[msisk6]

I've had my Amazon account since '98 or so. I still have items on my wishlist from the 90s.

Think of all the database upgrades over the years to move that data forward...

[weinzierl]

I created an Amazon account when Amazon was pretty new and just sold books. Ordered a few books and then forgot about it. A couple of years later, when Amazon got popular I tried to login again and it did not work, so I wrote them an e-mail and they said it had been deactivated because of inactivity but now they had restored it. Different times.

When Amazon got really big and dabbled in the ad business I deleted it, so I don't have it anymore. Only created a new one when the pandemic hit.

[rimunroe]

I have a still-functional though no longer in active use AOL account which I think is from ~1996 when I was ~9. My parents were subscribers so it was created as part of their family account.

By the late 2000s I had migrated to Gmail and was only using my AOL account for AIM. One day a friend texted me to ask if I might have been hacked. It turns out my mom's account--and thus those of mine and my siblings--had been compromised. We'd not been subscribed for a very long time, and AOL customer support for account recovery was basically non-existent for non-subscribers.

My brother happened to know Adrian Lamo[1]. Adrian still knew people on AOL's security team from when he was a thorn in their side. He was able get our accounts restored and enable additional protections for our accounts. I did a short phone call with him after it was done and thanked him for being so much more helpful than AOL. His response was, "I try to provide better customer support than the people I hack."

I haven't used that account for anything other than recovering other ancient accounts of mine since AIM was shutdown, although I wasn't using it very frequently by then anyway. Friends had long since migrated to other platforms.

[1] This was probably 1-2 years before he turned in Chelsea Manning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Lamo

[RajT88]

I too have an AOL account from 1996. I used to occasionally IM people with it until about 2015, but haven't actually emailed anyone with it since I can't remember when. 2008? It's definitely my oldest account.

[scbrg]

    Character created:    Tue Oct  3 09:43:00 1995

A MUD. Still logged in all the time. Had a few characters before that one.

[eastern]

My Yahoo mail account was created as a Rocketmail account, likely in 1996 or 97, when Rocketmail launched and became the biggest Hotmail rival.

Yahoo acquired it and it became Yahoo mail.

So 27 or 28 years

[tgv]

I suppose it's Yahoo for me too. I thought it was a few years older than that, but it can't be, as it was launched in '97, indeed.

[tmaly]

Same, came here to say yahoo mail

[kurttheviking]

This was a fun one to lookup. eBay 2001, Amazon 1999 (first order was a book I needed for high school as well as VHS tape for the movie Heat), but my winner is Yahoo Mail 1997. I'm sure my AIM account would be older but is long since deleted.

[zigman1]

How prevalent was Amazon in 1999? Was it the usual place to order books, or would your schoolmates give you a dead stare if you said that you ordered it from there?

[Arubis]

I've still got an ICQ number that works, though I've not used it (prior to today) in at least a decade, probably two. Eight-digit starting with 1, so probably 1997-1998?

[jghn]

> Eight-digit starting with 1, so probably 1997-1998

I had a very low 7 digit number and the earliest I would have created the account was late summer 1997. My recollection is it was hockey sticking at the time, so that boundary between 97/98 seems spot on.

[sixothree]

I've tried a hundred times to recover my 7 digit ICQ number for the longest time. I think it will never happen.

[pavel_lishin]

Mine's a seven-digit, starting with 5. I have no idea what that dates it to.

[yardie]

Still have my college email address. But none of the clients can login until I physically go in and reset the password at helpdesk, 4HELP.

I actively use the eBay account I created in 1998.

And my Slashdot burner account has become my main account because my primary account is tied to my old ISP email address. Learned to never do that again.

[compsciphd]

> And my Slashdot burner account has become my main account because my primary account is tied to my old ISP email address. Learned to never do that again.

4 digit account #s forever :) (in practice, hadn't logged in for forever till now).

[saltcured]

If we count email, I still use an address from my employer that was established on my first day in 1997. I lost my college accounts around then, though a student group one lasted longer than official ones. Since email was also used with USENET, I didn't have any other online, public-at-large accounts until instant messaging invaded work a few years later. So I think I had AOL (AIM) and Microsoft (MSN) first, but haven't kept them active.

Close in there would be online commerce. I don't have detailed records, but probably started using Dell and Amazon quite early in the original dot-com era. Probably also B&H Photo Video and Crutchfield, since these were businesses I already knew from the mail-based catalog era.

I think I also had an online account with my bank by around the same time I started my job, though it took me a couple more years to wean myself off writing paper checks and primarily using bill pay.

[sph]

Not sure which is it, but supposing it's a 20+ year old account, it is very likely that:

- the site has been hacked probably dozens of time since I created the account, and my credentials are sold for peanuts these days.

- the password I used wasn't very strong at all, and it has been cracked and shared in plain text for years

- the original domain now probably is in hands of some domain parking bullshit company, selling ads.

In all likelihood, my oldest working account must be the NickServ registration on some IRC network. Though I started with IRCNet and I don't think they had a registration service.

[PopAlongKid]

I've created hundreds of accounts since the mid-1990s. The only two accounts I can think that fall under your description are MySpace and LinkedIn (the latter I joined shortly after it started, and I suppose my MySpace login still works but I haven't tried it in years).

I made a rare (for me) mistake early on, using the same password for Facebook that I was already using on MySpace. Fortunately, I did not use the same email address, so that password was of limited use to anyone else. These passwords have since been changed, of course.

[pushcx]

I've had a small, shared hosting plan for personal stuff since fall of 1999. I recently talked to an employee who was younger than my account.

[whatamidoingyo]

Hm, I still have an AOL email address that my mom made for me when I was 9 years old (19 years ago). I remember signing up for spam ads (e.g. "YOU WON! Click here to claim reward"). I spent hours filling out forms to claim the prizes, but nothing ever came. Bummer.

But yeah, that email is basically trash and I never use it. I last logged into it maybe 3 years ago.

[fourseventy]

Probably my Gmail account that I got when it was still in beta circa 2005.

[marpstar]

My original eBay account (which is now in possession of my mother -- who "borrowed" it one day to list some trinket she found at a garage sale, got hooked, sold a few more things, and didn't want to give it back after she had amassed some positive feedback) lists 4/10/1999 as the signup date.

Amazon since April 2001.

Gmail since invite-only days (03-04?)

[Urgo]

Back when I was 14 I was at a friends house and I needed a name for a character in a MUSH (like a MUD) based on Lord of the Rings that he was playing. That day I created the username I still use to this day. Amazing to see they still keep the lights on over there almost 29 years later!

Urgo..................Jun 23 1995

[acheron]

I don't think I have anything 90s that still works. I remember ordering from Amazon in 1999 or earlier but my current account has my first order from early 2002, so I must have recreated the account for some reason. Ebay is about the same time, 01/02. My Yahoo email is probably 2001. AIM would have been 98/99 but they killed it. ICQ would have been earlier but I haven't logged into it since 2000-01 probably, if it still exists I wouldn't know the password. Actually Slashdot would have been 98 I think? (six digit UID starting with 100xxx; I'd have gotten 5 digits if I'd created the account a week or so earlier :P), but I went through and did the "delete my account" request there maybe six months ago.

Can't think of anything else that would still be around from before about 2001.

[bboreham]

I’ve had my account on CIX since 1990. It’s a social network; I get to see people arguing, and occasionally helping each other.

For a while, pre dial-up Internet, it was my gateway to Usenet.

https://cix.uk/contact/about

[ttyyzz]

German website hoster in '99. They changed their name 3 times in the meantime and I still got unlimited webspace there - any ideas what to do with it? (oh and i see, unlimited sql databases as well...)

My steam account is pretty old, too. 2003 (Got the 20 years of service badge lol)

[lb1lf]

Amazon, 1999. Only used for Kindle purchases nowadays.

eBay, 1998. Used regularly.

SSH login at my Alma Mater's Computer Club, 1997. Daily. Primary E-mail.

Also had a Hotmail account which MS eventually canned as I failed to login sufficiently often. Must have been created in 1996, I was still in high school.

[thorin]

I believe I have a Hotmail account from around 1997/8 which I still use indirectly for some services although I never read my mail there and Microsoft cleared out all my old mail automatically so I can't see when it first started.

My first order from Amazon was in 2001, not sure what date they started in the UK, but I seem to remember that was fairly typical for my friendship group. I knew some of the UK guys at EBay who I used to work with from around 1998, but I never use my account there and I don't think it's quite that old. I feel like I joined HN around 2006.

I do have some PHPBB site logins from the late 90s as well I guess, which I can probably still connect to!

[onychomys]

My gamefaqs account has been used basically every day since April 11th, 2002.

[cannolicannon]

Same here. Created a Gfaqs account on August 30th, 2001 and have kept it active ever since.

[readingnews]

Define "online"?

Sure, I have that ebay account that I created when ebay started in 1995, but if we just say "any online service", well, I have run my own e-mail server since 1994, so I guess that predates it. I do not even want to admit this, but my Yahoo account is still valid, I see emails from 1994 also.

If we go with email, I was a sysadmin at a university, and at least two professors in our department had emails from the 1980s. Their account was the same, and still worked, of course, does that count?

[Brajeshwar]

I created my Hotmail account on Aug 2, 1999 -- the day I reached the city of Bombay (India). I came from a small hill-town in India and there was no Internet, so the first thing I did was go to an Internet café (of course, the second thing was visit the beach and touch the Ocean's water). I lost the account temporarily in 2000 but I "hacked" it back and own it, kept it. Now, we use this for our family account for all things Microsoft (Minecraft, Windows).

[voidfunc]

I was sifting through old email recently and rediscovered my neopets account from early 2000s. I had to contact then to unlock it as it had been soft deactivated in the interim but they were friendly about it and I answered some questions and got access.

There's not much going on with neopets if you're curious.. it's basically a zombie IP at this point in terms of features / game play.

[patrickserrano]

I just recently switched the email associated with my Xbox account from the Hotmail I created in '98 or '99 to my current email address. That Xbox account is probably the oldest account I'm actively using since it's from around when Halo 2 launched.

I'm sure I have logins for older accounts stored in 1Password, but none of them would be anything actively used.

[zmj]

My World of Warcraft account. 20 years this fall!

[vsnf]

Same. But my EQ account from Kunark would be even older, by about 4 years.

[sonicanatidae]

ICQ - 6 digit address. It's 30+ years old at this point. I still use it once in awhile.

Sadly, my Compu-Serve account no longer works. :|

[BjoernKW]

To this day, I still remember my ICQ number from back in the nineties. However, unfortunately the same doesn't apply to the password and I can't seem to be able to reset it.

[eloisant]

What do you use ICQ for?

I stopped using it when it became pretty much just a dating service.

[walthamstow]

I'm a bit younger than some here, but my teenage tumblr blog is still online, and my Gmail and Spotify accounts are still the same accounts from when those services were invite-only, so 2004 and 2010 respectively.

As an aside, I was reading a review of a book about Richard Nixon on Amazon recently, and noticed that the review was from 1998.

[lapetitejort]

My somethingawful.com account just celebrated 20 years. I logged back on and haunted some of the old boards but didn't feel the same magic as back in the day. My Steam account will be hitting 20 years soon as well

My first Amazon purchase was in 1999. eBay doesn't save purchases that far back but it must be a similar age.

[SubGenius]

I have a hotmail account from 2000. A wikipedia account from 2006! I don't remember when exactly Gmail was in early beta (2004?) but I did manage to register [e-mail] and have used it since.

Also have a super early HN account that I no longer remember the password to. So...

[wistlo]

The OG cloud email service, AOL, still revive it for testing now and then, from 1993.

Yahoo! account established July 17, 1996. I know the exact date because I remember a hyperlink blue headline across the top of the gray Yahoo! home page, "TWA Plane Explodes Off Long Island"

[fullstop]

I still have an ICQ account from 1996, and I can still sign into it. It's a low six-digit UIN.

[whitehexagon]

wow. How to test? I tried my old account on icq dot com but doesnt seem to exist.

[whitehexagon]

Probably hotmail from '96, scary! I seem to recall it was invite only from a friend whilst I was on a contract down in London. Closed all my other big tech accounts over the past few years, mostly in protest, including finally google this week (html basic mode).

[jghn]

My main online banking account is from 1998. Have another cluster of accounts from 1999, things like eBay & Amazon. Have a domain name, and thus email, that also dates to 1999.

I was recently able to recover an old Ultima Online account from 1997, but that feels like cheating here.

[throwaway_08932]

Wow, I'm surprised at the banking account from 1998. That happened rather quickly given that the web wasn't really on anyone's radar until 95/96 or so.

[bikingbismuth]

It is going to be close between my gmail (I was invited during the beta in 2004) and my bank which would have been 2002/2003 timeframe but I can’t remember for sure.

I can remember earlier accounts like deadjournal, Hotmail, something awful, but I don’t use those anymore.

[oneeyedpigeon]

I'd forgotten about gmail being in beta like that — hardly surprising, of course! My welcome email confirmed it; it begins "First off, welcome. And thanks for agreeing to help us test Gmail." Dated June 2004.

[surfsvammel]

My first mail in my gmail account is 20 years old. Not sure if that is my oldest account though.

[Adverblessly]

It is or used to be the case that as part of account recovery Google would ask you when you created your account as a sort of security question that applies to everyone, so I'd suggest discretion when you think about making such information public.

[oneeyedpigeon]

I really hope they've stopped doing that. Now that so many of the answers are going to be "about 20 years ago", no legitimate users are going to remember these specifics!

[PopAlongKid]

I have been using E*Trade (stock brokerage) continuously since late 1990s. I'm sure I have a few others from the mid-90s, but no easy way to confirm earliest use date without pawing through thousands of old emails for account setup confirmations.

[atela]

I’ve got a Yahoo! mail address from the 90s that’s still what I use for rando account signups

[soco]

Is there a way to check how old the Yahoo account is? Back in the days you only had some megs of storage available, so my older emails are all deleted...

[eitally]

I have a university account from 1995. I have a VWVortex (car forum) account from 1999. I used to have a sheet of paper with handwritten account information that I know I wrote in 1999-2000, but I've lost it.

[megan_]

You’ve proved your mettle to be the most reliable and affordable hacker anyone can work with thank you for your prompt service I’m super impressed (arpanethack at gmail dot com)

[madcaptenor]

Just checked my Amazon history and it goes back to 2001. I remember clearly that I was ordering from Amazon in 1998 or so, but I suspect that was actually on my parents' account.

[rchaud]

A warez forum I signed up for in 2011

A soccer messageboard I signed up for 2012

My old Reddit accounts that just had a username/pw login (no email) were wiped out during the whole 3rd paty API shift of summer 2023.

[tqwhite]

Amazon, absolutely. EBay is number two, though I haven't actually used it in years. (I still get a reverse invoice for a credit they owe from the 90's. Hilarious.)

[bdcravens]

The oldest one I'm aware of that still exists and that I can still log into is my ICQ account (from 1997). My Slashdot account is still active (1997 or 1998).

[sinuhe69]

My Yahoo Mail account was probably created 1997 and I’m still using it. My ICQ account should be still functioning, albeit nobody I know using it anymore :’(

[BjoernKW]

I suppose that'd be my Amazon account (mid to end nineties). Other than that, my Microsoft account, which used to be my Skype account from 2003 (IIRC).

[yogorenapan]

Although I obviously have older accounts, I’ve pretty much lost all of them except GitHub. Have gone through 5 email providers over the span of its life

[fanf2]

My domain name dotat.at dates back to 1997, so it's 26.5 years old now. I think my account on chiark is maybe a year older.

[ChrisRR]

There's a forum for a game I used to play on windows 95. It seems my account is still active on there from around 2001

[oneeyedpigeon]

My gmail account turns 20 this year. Ebay says I joined in 2001. The winner, so far, is Amazon; my first order was in 2000.

[sorbet]

i’d say my actual oldest is an AOL account whose creation date is sometime in 1990.

but if you count data migration errors setting creation dates back to unix timestamp 0, then my RocketMail account takes the cake! apparently every RM account had its creation date set to 0, according to others i’ve spoken to about the issue.

[gadders]

Interesting question.

I think my oldest account that still works would be my Slashdot account in the 70k User ID range.

Possibly my Amazon account.

[arrty88]

I have a DSLReports account that is still active from 1999 or so. Also my yahoo email from 1997.

[grubbs]

My DSLReports is my oldest! 1999.

[Dalewyn]

Hotmail. Still in active use as my "for important life affairs" email address.

[masteruvpuppetz]

Yahoo mail.. made between 2001 or 2003. I couldn't see any date of creation.

[vandyswa]

My self-hosted web and email goes back to 1997... still in use. (vsta.org)

[codethatwerks]

Gmail 2004. I wish I kept my 1998 hotmail then that would be the oldest!

[5555624]

Probably my eBay account, 29 March 1997; last used a couple of weeks ago

[zippergz]

Ebay 1998 (used a few times a year), amazon 1997 (used all the time)

[Rucadi]

My hotmail account reconverted to skype and then microsoft account

[snakeyjake]

I opened the Amazon account I use today sometime in August 1998.

[abhinavk]

Google/Gmail account from 2007. I was a tween back then.

[United857]

Amazon — my first purchase was in 1997 for a test prep book.

[joshxyz]

came to realize the lifetime of my gmail accounts is relative to the lifetimee of the phone numbers attached to them

[redeuxx]

Mine is also from GameFAQs, 2001 ... to argue in LUE.

[icedchai]

My email at a personal domain is going on 30 years.

[totetsu]

A few discworld mud characters have would think.

[MiguelVieira]

My Amazon account order history starts in 1998.

[raydev]

My Gmail account will be 20 years old in a few months. I may still have access to my Hotmail account created circa 1998/1999 but I'm scared to look in there.

Everything else, AIM and MSN, my Geocities and Angelfire and Tripod pages, all the various forums, all lost to time. Good riddance to most of that, honestly.

[Brajeshwar]

Yes, Gmail was Aprils’ Day of 2004.

[atsaloli]

livejournal.com sent me a virtual gift for my 20 years anniversary -- I had created the account in 2004

[calvinmorrison]

My runescape account. July 6th 2004.

[D13Fd]

Ars Technica forums, over 25 years.

[tamimio]

Probably the bank account.

[bloopernova]

Amazon, 1996, I think. I bought Kim Stanley Robinson's Blue Mars. I got a note saying that I was one of their first UK customers, this was before the UK based Amazon existed.

And a mousemat with a Groucho Marx quote: "Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read".

[savrajsingh]

my amazon acct has my first order from 1998...

[xtiansimon]

In addition to sites mentioned already (eBay 1998, Hotmail 1997), my metafilter.com account is the same (8-8-2002) and I visit weekly.

[vagrantJin]

oh. Jesus.

it my Yahoo mail acc.

only had proper access to internet in 2011 - when I entered Uni and then created my Yahoo mail. what a trip.

being from a developing economy and all, Id like to clarify that we did have internet but it was hella expensive and my family personally could not afford it.

[delduca]

I've been using Gmail since 2006, but I am now transitioning to iCloud with a custom domain as part of my #degoogling efforts.