July 30, 2004.

An email from my dad.

I don't delete emails unless they're spam.

I've got one from Thu, 10 Mar 1994, but it's boring and this one stands out more:

On Sat, 17 Feb 1996, Dolphin Satan wrote:

I can't fuckin see your page man!You need to get rid of that white font.

Fuck you. Get some fucking glasses.

1996 if you count print copies in a binder.

First week of May, 1990. Welcome email to my first job on a university campus. I exported to an mbox file and can still access with Thunderbird. I have every email since. It's... a lot.

Sept 7, 1993. It’s a college-oriented chain email that ends with “pass the beer” that a friend who’d just gone to college sent to about 30 people, which caused ancillary reply-all conversations for the next year or so.

When you realise this is a recovery question to your email account 👀

Nice try, but I'm not going to get scammed into sharing my Neopets password reset link with you!

The earliest message I have accessible in Thunderbird is from the 25th of May, 2001. It's part of a conversation with old work colleagues who I had remained drinking buddies with when I started a new job nearby. (There are actually two messages with earlier dates, but one is an imported message from March of 2001 that wasn't actually sent or originally received by me, and another that's an old Usenet post, probably also imported, that doesn't have a datestamp at all, registering as 1/1/1970.)

If I go digging around in my university backup, I have messages from 1998 in there. I would have earlier e-mails, but quota was limited on the University systems, so I expect I deleted everything at the start of every year.

September 2026, I never saw the appeal to keep everything. I have 10 emails right now. When I receive one, I act on it or store the useful part, then it goes to the trash.

August 30th 2004. It's the welcome email from when I signed up for the Gmail beta(!) way back when. Unfortunately my first e-mail address and inbox hasn’t made it. It was a proprietary webmail from my ISP, so I couldn’t transfer it to Gmail.

Original welcome email on my Gmail October 2005.

Subject was "Gmail is different. Here's what you need to know."

Probably some mail from 95. I never delete anything.

I have older in backups but that's the oldest one in an IMAP folder on my server.

If I exclude SMART status reports then the oldest one is from 2023-08-21 and is sitting in the trash. If I exclude trash then 2025-07-30 from my mom.

I usually deal with emails immediatelly and then delete them completely (not sending them to a trash).

2003 or 2004, I’m not scrolling through 50k emails to check

I logged into my old email I started using on the year Star Wars Episode 1 came out. I don't think I've ever deleted mail on it, so probably from that year.

It does not seem to have a way to sort the mail by anything, so also not by date. I tried scrolling down and down and down and dow...
...but it started hogging more and more ram when I did that and around when I reached May 2023, my browser crashed. Anyway, I apparently have approximately 41 000 unread emails in that mailbox!

But, I guess my oldest undeleted email is probably something about my LiveJournal account? :P

I had email going back to at least 1996 if not earlier, but my computer was stolen in 2004 during a move, and that was before the big switch from POP3 to IMAP.

I don't want to look, I've had that account since the early 2000s.

Can't access my old Yahoo account, so the oldest is Feb 15, 2007 signing up for StumbleUpon

9/27/2004

No clue since I haven't checked in a while. I usually clear out majority of my inboxes every once in a while, so definitely something from the past 2 years, I'd guess, considering I haven't done it in a while.

Nov 2003

November 13, 2001 Subject: Download link for The Murray Game

Thank you for using Free Downloads Center!

The link was pointing to a geocities.com site. Oh those were the days...

January 2025 for a tax receipt; if you count deleted emails saved locally, probably a legal matter-related email in 2023. I delete almost everything as long as they are no longer useful so...

On my IRL account, not very. It has a data limit, and some people just have to attach a ton of random videos. On some weird forgotten account somewhere, who knows?