Once derided as luddites, Hotmail holdouts have watched their ancient email provider become cool again.

Email in 2004 was fundamentally borked. Inboxes were capped at a few megabytes of storage, meaning an attachment or two could force you into a frenzy of archiving and deleting. Conversations weren’t threaded, so every reply popped up as a new message you’d have to forensically trace back to its origin like a CSI detective. Your uncle was constantly sending you chain emails with the subject line “FW: FW: FW: Archeologists have DISCOVERED Noah’s ark.”

No wonder Gmail changed everything. When it arrived offering a whole gigabyte of storage on April 1, 2004, everyone thought it was an April Fools joke. Not having to go inbox zero every time someone sent you a picture of a cat? Threaded replies? A working search function? Impossible. It had to be another of the jape-happy colourful alphabet company’s famous pranks. 

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.

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’d never left Myspace. What kept these people loyal to such an ancient provider? How had they resisted the pressures of time and technological advancement?

For Nori Iitsuka, the answer is simple. “I missed the big wave when everyone moved to Gmail. Honestly, there’s no real reason to switch now. It’s too much of a hassle,” she says. 

Iitsuka is a true Hotmail stalwart. Her address contains the initials “ss”, in reference to her “small size”. She’s kept that original ID despite later learning what some people associate with those letters. “I did NOT know what “ss” means overseas when I created it,” she writes via Hotmail.

Iitsuka didn’t end up coming to my party. But she’s 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.

The poet and writer Nick Ascroft attributes his Hotmail retention to a “slackercore” aesthetic. Filmmaker and singer-songwriter Ramon Te Wake says she just didn’t ever have a reason to make a switch. “I have a Hotmail account in the same way I still tape my case to my phone or glue my gym shoes together – if it ain’t broke why fix it. Equally if it is broke, tape it,” she says.

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’ve come this far and there’s no point changing. “Imagine trying to change your doctor, your bank, your insurance, your loyalty things and your IRD,” says Rosie*, who wants nothing to do with The Spinoff. “What a hassle that would be.” 

But what may have started out as recalcitrance has taken on a kind of cultural cache. In 2004, Google was still the “don’t be evil” company, but the last two decades haven’t been kind. Economically, it’s been accused of monopolistic practices and mass data harvesting but at least on the social side it has also been implicated in radicalisation and the resurgence of fascism.

Though Hotmail, owned by Microsoft, isn’t much better, it at least feels a bit countercultural. To Ascroft, using it is a small act of defiance. “It harks back to a time when things on the internet weren’t owned by three companies,” he says. “It has the veneer of non-corporate lapdog, while in fact being the same as the rest.” Te Wake agrees. “My friend reminded me last night I don’t often follow trends and I march to the beat of my own drum so Hotmail might be my resistance.”

It helps that, unlike some of us, most of these people didn’t choose a stupid name for their first Hotmail. Ascroft’s 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 and pinky_sprinkler@hotmail.com. Besides practicality, there’s 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. “My Hotmail address feels like the last relic of my adolescence. Everything else – the long blonde hair, Roxy board shorts and teenage angst – is gone now,” she says. 

Though some appeal to nostalgia, others are willing to offer a simple, full-throated defence of the service. “Hotmail is, quite simply, the superior email provider,” says Newsroom news director Cassandra Mason. Her case is simple: Gmail folds emails into “ungovernable piles”. The colours annoy her. Then there’s the platforms’ respective trajectories. While it was an undeniable market leader in 2004, Gmail has enshittified while Hotmail has been making improvements. “Has it ever told me I was running out of space? No. And I haven’t deleted a thing in there since 2001,” says Mason. “Having got in early, I also didn’t have to suffer the indignity of adding a 69 or whatever to my name. So that’s always been a source of pride for me, as you can imagine.”

For Mason, it’s time to “end the stigma” that comes with Hotmail and return to a pre-Gmail age. It’s hard to argue. If there’s an overarching message in our current culture, it’s 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 “getting off the computer and going outside”. If you’d stayed in the same clothes you wore in 1998 you’d be fashionable again today. It seems technology is no different. History isn’t linear. The future is the past. It’s time to reclaim a Hotmail address. Sadly hot_male@hotmail.com is already taken.

*Names have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.