In '96 (or around there) I heard from some of the older kids about this new cool thing called "Hotmail" (pre-Microsoft). Also remember the horror when one of my friends misspelled "mail" as "male" when typing it into AltaVista...

Still exists - http://www.pmail.com/

By 1998, household internet had been a "thing" for several years. You could get a normal Internet e-mail account from an ISP.