For many, many years…decades even, my main email/ISP etc was hosted on an outfit called Zip, or even zipworld. It was progressively swallowed up by larger and companies, till in 2015 it ended up with Telstra. Telstra recently announced that they were shutting down the smaller networks though I could seek an account with them if I liked.

Admittedly, the last few years I’ve been maintaining my zip account primarily as an email forwarder for sending/receiving email. At home, my partner has connectivity with another provider. My old website no longer works though I do have full backups (on my PC, external hard drive, and NAS), plus you can find it on the wayback machine.

Update: it’s not dead yet. Curiously, if I use “my.zipworld.com.au” instead of “www.zipworld.com.au”, my old site is still accessible :-) Of course, all the links I have that point to it are broken.

My primary email address (not zip) was pointing to my zip account now points to my gmail account. My old zip account is mostly used by a couple of elists, the odd family missive, and a lot of spam. The mail server hasn’t died yet though I expect that will happen one day but I’m still successfully using it to send email…and spammers continue to use it successfully to send me email.

Anyways, I am a little sad to say goodbye to dear old zip. The big advantage in the early days was the work they did in maintaining a local usenet server and it was why I signed up in the first place. Of course, it’s been a long since I used usenet either. Usenet was replaced by other things, and eventually there was twitter and facebook, which picked up some sense of community that I was missing.