Edsamail Eulogy

Long weekend. A rainy night. The "5-day-long-weekend" ends tomorrow. The sun has been hiding; I've accumulated enough bedweather for a whole month. Had covert this stored up potential energy something productive. I caught up with some BIG TIME BACKLOG entries on blogging. 

However, the internet has been irritatingly wonky during this 5-day workbreak. I can't even work from home decently because of the slow connection. I saw this revised Maslow's hierarchy of needs posted in Facebook:

Too bad Maslow didn't see this

Facebook, Twitter and Gmail have been loading unusually slow from time to time. It made me think about my other non-Gmail email addys.I remebered: Edsamail!

Edsamail CD anyone?

 
Remember those 56 kbps dial-up days? When the cheapest internet card was Rebel? It was Php 100 for 4 hours, and you can get a free email add with Rebel. Then Pacific offered Php 100 for 10 hours. Then came ISP Bonanza with Php 100 for 20 hours. I remember patting and talking to our dial-up modem to please please please connect to the internet during these days. (If you don't remember, then I guess you are you are younger than me =P)

Enter DSL age. We got Bayantel's DSL package (same provider until now) and kissed the 40-minute-per-mp3-download world goodbye. Hello YouTube!

During those dial up days, Edsamail was the savior of the students who wants to check their email for free. The edsamail CD installers were passed around class. There are these special email addys: ___@mariaclara.ph, ___@climbers.ph, etc. Lotsa jokes and videos were forwarded. I joined a lot of yahoogroups back then. However, there was just a 1MB limit on the size of the email attachments hence you could not forward an mp3. Everyone who had a computer and a dial-up modem had a free access to the email world.

Come my freshie days in 2001, Edsamail announced that their service was not for free anymore. One would have to pay Php 365 a year if you'll continue using their service (Add Php 100 to maintain your special email add). They marketed it in a way that the rate is still cheaper than a cellphone load. I fell for it. So I paid that Php 365. Then next year, they raised their fees to Php 500. I still paid that. And paid another Php 500 the next year. I maintained my Edsamail email till around my OJT days. Then I got fed up and finally made the switch to Gmail with its Gigabyte capacity. Why was I so stubborn to change for so long? Gaaaah. I bid farewell to lorainefg@edsamail.com.ph. Consumed by my Edsamail memories, I unearthed the free CD they gave out in malls back then.

Free Edsamail CD

I googled up on Edsamail, this is what I found:

Edsamail 2013

That is the same URL of Edsamail during the days I accessed its web-based platform. I sent out my resumes using my Edsamail email address, despite everyone having a Yahoo and Gmail emails. Pinanindigan ko talaga!

Good thing we are now in the Broadband era. Dial-up era is a scary time to remember.