As it became clear Gmail was real, an exodus ensued. At first it was gradual, partly because the platform was initially invite-only. Then it was all at once. People ditched their Hotmail and Yahoo accounts en masse, fleeing to a megabyte-filled utopia. In months, everyone was gone.<\/p>\n
Well, almost everyone. During a recent effort to send out some birthday party invites, I was confronted by several unusual historic artefacts. Not just one, but multiple potential attendees had retained their old Hotmail addresses. I was possessed by a feeling similar to what I can only imagine archeologists experience when they uncover a dinosaur bone. It was like finding a lost community who\u2019d never left Myspace. What kept these people loyal to such an ancient provider? How had they resisted the pressures of time and technological advancement?<\/p>\n
For Nori Iitsuka, the answer is simple. \u201cI missed the big wave when everyone moved to Gmail. Honestly, there\u2019s no real reason to switch now. It\u2019s too much of a hassle,\u201d she says.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Iitsuka is a true Hotmail stalwart. Her address contains the initials \u201css\u201d, in reference to her \u201csmall size\u201d. She\u2019s kept that original ID despite later learning what some people associate with those letters. \u201cI did NOT know what \u201css\u201d means overseas<\/a> when I created it,\u201d she writes via Hotmail.<\/p>\n Iitsuka didn\u2019t end up coming to my party. But she\u2019s not alone in either rejecting me or her reasons for keeping a primordial email address. A wider survey of lingering Hotmail users shows aversion to change and laziness are the main things keeping people on the platform. They failed to catch the Gmail wave, and too much life has accumulated in their old inbox.<\/p>\n The poet and writer Nick Ascroft attributes his Hotmail retention to a \u201cslackercore\u201d aesthetic. Filmmaker and singer-songwriter Ramon Te Wake says she just didn\u2019t ever have a reason to make a switch. \u201cI have a Hotmail account in the same way I still tape my case to my phone or glue my gym shoes together \u2013 if it ain\u2019t broke why fix it. Equally if it is broke, tape it,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n Hotmail has fixed most of the things that gave Gmail an advantage, increasing its storage capacity and allowing people to organise their inboxes better. Now the general sentiment from those who have remained there is that they\u2019ve come this far and there\u2019s no point changing. \u201cImagine trying to change your doctor, your bank, your insurance, your loyalty things and your IRD,\u201d says Rosie*, who wants nothing to do with The Spinoff. \u201cWhat a hassle that would be.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n But what may have started out as recalcitrance has taken on a kind of cultural cachet. In 2004, Google was still the \u201cdon\u2019t be evil\u201d company, but the last two decades haven\u2019t been kind. Economically, it\u2019s been accused of monopolistic practices and mass data harvesting<\/a> but at least on the social side it has also been implicated in radicalisation and the resurgence of fascism.<\/p>\n Though Hotmail, owned by Microsoft, isn\u2019t much better, it at least feels a bit countercultural. To Ascroft, using it is a small act of defiance. \u201cIt harks back to a time when things on the internet weren\u2019t owned by three companies,\u201d he says. \u201cIt has the veneer of non-corporate lapdog, while in fact being the same as the rest.\u201d Te Wake agrees. \u201cMy friend reminded me last night I don\u2019t often follow trends and I march to the beat of my own drum so Hotmail might be my resistance.\u201d<\/p>\n It helps that, unlike some of us, most of these people didn\u2019t choose a stupid name for their first Hotmail. Ascroft\u2019s contact list is still littered with friends and acquaintances who used to operate out of addresses like mug_of_tears@hotmail.com, hot_male@hotmail.com<\/a> and pinky_sprinkler@hotmail.com<\/a>. Besides practicality, there\u2019s an element of nostalgia at play. Spinoff writer Emma Gleason still has Hotmail. It remains with her as a reminder of better days gone by, before she had to sit in an office answering annoying Slack messages from me about her Hotmail address. \u201cMy Hotmail address feels like the last relic of my adolescence. Everything else \u2013 the long blonde hair, Roxy board shorts and teenage angst \u2013 is gone now,\u201d she says.\u00a0<\/p>\n Though some appeal to nostalgia, others are willing to offer a simple, full-throated defence of the service. \u201cHotmail is, quite simply, the superior email provider,\u201d says Newsroom news director Cassandra Mason. Her case is simple: Gmail folds emails into \u201cungovernable piles\u201d. The colours annoy her. Then there\u2019s the platforms\u2019 respective trajectories. While it was an undeniable market leader in 2004, Gmail has enshittified<\/a> while Hotmail has been making improvements. \u201cHas it ever told me I was running out of space? No. And I haven\u2019t deleted a thing in there since 2001,\u201d says Mason. \u201cHaving got in early, I also didn\u2019t have to suffer the indignity of adding a 69 or whatever to my name. So that\u2019s always been a source of pride for me, as you can imagine.\u201d<\/p>\n For Mason, it\u2019s time to \u201cend the stigma\u201d that comes with Hotmail and return to a pre-Gmail age. It\u2019s hard to argue. If there\u2019s an overarching message in our current culture, it\u2019s that much of the last 30 years has been a mistake. Records and CDs are returning thanks to growing disillusionment with streaming. A growing cohort of people are waking to the benefits of \u201cgetting off the computer and going outside<\/a>\u201d. If you\u2019d stayed in the same clothes you wore in 1998 you\u2019d be fashionable again today. It seems technology is no different. History isn\u2019t linear. The future is the past. It\u2019s time to reclaim a Hotmail address. Sadly hot_male@hotmail.com<\/a> is already taken.<\/p>\n *Names have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Once derided as luddites, Hotmail holdouts have watched their ancient email provider become cool again. Email in 2004…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":524684,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[156,35932,367,238633,609,111,139,69,2935],"class_list":["post-524683","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gmail","tag-google","tag-hotmail","tag-microsoft","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-society"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524683","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=524683"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524683\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/524684"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=524683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=524683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=524683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Ramon Te Wake (Photo: On the Rag)<\/p>\n