The first email address for the parish office
The parish office of the parish of St. Kornelius and Cyprian in Kirrlach should be reachable by email. For reasons that cannot be reconstructed later, I am responsible for this. (Possibly because I convinced the priest or the parish secretaries that something like this was needed.) A modem is installed in the parish office, I do the rest: At the beginning of December 2001 I buy the domain st-kornelius-und-cyprian.de, But it will take until the beginning of January for things to progress. It took a while because the parish office has to fax the contract before activating the domain and the email and web hosting package. Also in December I bought a license for the email program “The Bat” for 103 marks. (The euro was introduced on January 1, 2002.) I set everything up in the parish office; access is initially via the call-by-call provider Argon for 1.48 cents per minute. The pastoral officer has the emails forwarded to the new work address to his private email address, which he shares with his wife. I also use a text editor to create a website for the parish, which at least gives contact details and service times.
In the parish office, people don’t really warm to my somewhat complicated setup. As early as February 2002, the support was taken out of my hands and a deserving member of the parish council set everything up again with T-Online, and the fact that there was a nice domain of my own was ignored. (The contract probably simply expired at some point without an extension.) After all, the relatively good documentation at the time of writing (more than 20 years later) is due to a handover email received with all the data, which was never written without the change in project responsibility.
In 2002, the Kirrlach parish office was still relatively at the forefront with email, as can be seen from a history of email in the Archdiocese of Freiburg, which the Archbishop’s Archives published in September 2023: In 2001 there were the first internet guidelines for the Archdiocese of Freiburg . It was only in 2005 that parishes and all other church institutions in the archdiocese were required to be reachable “by electronic mail (e-mail)”.
(Felix Neumann)