email

The email account that will not die

a closed envelope

One of my first email accounts was with my internet service provider, SBC Global. The management of the account was transferred to ATT when they merged. When the email service was transferred to Yahoo, I understood that if I didn’t create a paired Yahoo account, the account would be deleted. I didn’t want yet another account, so I let the wait time expire and assumed the account was gone.

Imagine my surprise when I got an email today announcing that that email account would be deleted in about a month if I didn’t log it. I was suspicious of the email but, after checking the information, it seemed legitimate.

Once I went through the gyrations to get a new password on the account, I was able to see 1165 emails that had accumulated over the past 6 1/2 years. There were even a few from just last month. Many were phishing but there were some that were from companies I did business with many years ago.

I added the email address to my Thunderbird email client so that I can know what’s coming in without needing to go to a separate webpage. It’s at the very bottom of the list and I don’t plan to use it for anything beyond canceling sources that are sending to it.

It’s more evidence that even when internet companies say that they have deleted your data, it still might be laying around waiting to resurface.

Correspondence

A green thought bubble
A friend of mine accused me of being old school today.

Lately I’ve been sending friends U.S. Mail letters.

I think that getting a piece of paper in the mail is appreciated a little more than a missive in e-mail. It’s got some substance that you can decide to save in a scrap book when it comes from someone special. I treasure the letters I got from my grandmother.

When you read the letter, you’re seeing more than merely the traces of my fingers on a keyboard tidied up by a spell checker. You can see that there is a real human that you are communicating with.

What’s more romantic? Getting an email from your date thanking you for a nice evening or a physical card expressing gratitude in a flowing cursive script?

I’m not real enamored with “internet time.” The passage of time gives some perspective. I’m less likely to go on a circuitous rant about the current political dispute if I take 10 minutes writing in ink. I’m not going to hit “send” with some half-baked whining that I’ll regret 10 seconds later.

Time has great power. I don’t take enough of it. When I write a letter, you know that it’s something from the heart.