E-mail Fail


I remember my very first email address: grrrlfriend (with three r's, thankyouverymuch) at hotmail dot com. I got it when I was a senior in high school. That was back in the olden days, when email was brand-spanking-new and people still used libraries to look stuff up and dinosaurs followed us home from school.

In the early days of email, I got actual mail. Like, an electronic version of the notes normally passed to me in class by my friends. With conversations and gossip and questions and answers. Even a few love notes from Curtis, painstakingly pecked out with one finger, sparsely capitalized and punctuated. (He's learned a lot about both computers AND proper sentence structure since then, thank goodness.)

Then came the forwards. The first few were funny, a novelty. But then there was the onslaught of the stupid ones, i.e., "This is the story of little Timmy who sang to his baby sister on her deathbed who later reported seeing angels and teddy bears dancing on sparkly rainbows. Pass this to at least 200 people if you love Jesus."

I mean, I'm pretty sure me and the J-man will still be tight if I don't forward the heartwarming tale.

And now? My email, once a source of excitement ("Oooh! I got a new message!"), has become a source of stress for the most part. My actual person-to-person exchanges, I mean like written conversations, are few and far between. Yet my inbox is stuffed to the gills with "must-have deals" and "newsletter updates" from what seems like every store I've ever shopped in or organization whose website I've ever visited. And that's not even the spam. My spam folder currently contains 733 messages, and that's from the last thirty days alone. I don't even check that one any more, because it's too much to keep up with - and anyway, I don't need to enlarge my penis (huh?), satisfy my girlfriend (WTF?) or wire money to anyone in Nigeria.

I have 672 messages in my regular, non-spam inbox. They've gone undeleted because I obviously thought they were important enough to save, but honestly, y'all? I don't remember what 99% of them are even about. And the thought of going through them, one by one, just makes me tired. Yet the thought of doing one mass delete makes me nervous, in case there's something in there that - one of these years down the line - I might actually need to refer to. Ugh.

Ever just feel like deleting your email account and starting fresh with a new one?


Comments

  1. Yep. I do. I really shouldn't even be allowed to have an email account because I am horrible at responding which makes me seem rude. In reality, I'm just busy and forgetful and I often read email from my phone, which never actually sends the response which I type.
    I like one on one conversation over tea... or booze so much better.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I understand not wanting to delete your emails. But, I finally decided I was going to treat old emails like old clothes. If I haven't gone back and read them, after about 2 weeks, they are gone. Clothes do wait a little longer but you know, if you haven't worn it in over a year, you probably won't.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I like Dreamers idea, but I'm like you, except I have 900 something emails in my account.

    And I did open another account that I keep highly guarded :)

    ReplyDelete
  4. I agree about all those superfluous e-mails, and I especially hate the ones that threaten, "Send this to 20 people in the next 10 minutes or you'll have bad luck for a year." Or some such b#&@ s*#+. When my e-mails have ballooned to an unmanageable amount, I quickly look down the list and see if there are any senders I really need/want to hear from. Then I delete everything else!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Ah yes, email was so fun once I first started using it in high school. Now, I have actually written "go through emails" on my chore list--the drudgery!

    ReplyDelete
  6. I still have my original email from the Dark Ages. Of course I have a work email, a business email, a family email and a school email.... I would rather not have any of them at times!

    ReplyDelete
  7. The best part of Grrrlfriend is that people who have email addresses like that and use them on resumes. Really? teddybearlove@aol.com.... Sorry, we found someone else.

    I'm on my 3rd new email. The first @yahoo.com I use for junk. Like signing up for the zillionth stupid sweepstake or game that my daughter wants to play online and the like. My second @msn.com I've dropped because it wasn't professional enough. And my third @gmail.com is the one I now use for my resume (which I am no longer sending out for my stay at home mom position) and family/friend emails.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Oooh, gurl...I feel ya. I have the same personal email addy from high school. The most wise advice ever given to me from my mom was to create an email out of my name that I'm not ashamed to give to a college. So I did, and I've had it ever since.

    Only now, as time has progressed and technology has too, I am able to use my email account to house forwarded emails also. So, instead of checking two work email addresses (from two separate jobs) and my personal email on a daily basis, all three accounts show up in the same inbox, just color coded so I know which email is the recipient. It was one of those genius/idiot kinda moves. So, I feel ya. I would love a nice, long, thought out email one of these days....

    ReplyDelete

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