Lifetime E-Mail Address

I was just browsing through whois records of domains (I had nothing better to do :) ), and I noticed that Gmail.com was originally registered back in 1995. So, I wondered what was originally on that domain. I went over to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine and saw a copy of Gmail.com from December of 1996. Just a basic site offering an e-mail forwarding service. But, I have seen this a lot, "get a lifetime e-mail address". So, I wonder if anyone who signed up for that is trying to get their old address back now on Google's Gmail service.