About once a week or so, Gmail sends me an email warning that I am using 80 percent of my storage. My first snarky reply is to say (at least in my head) hey I would use less storage if you didn’t send so many of these warning emails. My second thought is to remember that there was a time when Gmail couldn’t understand why anyone would ever want to delete an email.
I’ve had a Gmail account for awhile. How long? Well, when I signed up for the service it was still in “beta” and was available by invitation only, but a coworker’s boyfriend had invites to share and so I made the switch over from my Earthlink address. In the early days of Gmail there was no way to delete messages. I’m not making that up. There was no trash bin, and no delete button. Users complained, and the developers were a bit perplexed. They didn’t understand why we would need to delete anything seeing as how we had unlimited storage.
Well, unlimited storage went the way of the dinosaurs and now Gmail users can delete messages, but I must admit I have not always made use of that deleting option. Periodically when life got hectic and I fell behind on reading emails, they piled up in my inbox. I feel like I do a pretty good job of keeping up with my emails these days, but I’ve had this account a long, long time and there’s a lot of old messages that sit there unread. I don’t want to go to extreme measures and delete all my emails and start with a clean slate because there are a lot I’ve saved for sentimental and other reasons. So, I just compose those snarky replies when Gmail’s warning messages come in and go about my day.
Of all the email addresses I’ve had (and I’ve had a number of them, though never one of those iconic AOL addresses of “you’ve got mail” fame), the one I miss the most is my Lycosmail address. It’s not that Lycosmail was an especially good email system, I mean they were about the same as any other, honestly, but what I miss about it was the simplicity of my address. It was alissa@lycosmail.com. Since then, I’ve never succeeded in getting an email address early enough to score a first name only address, even with a less common spelling of a name that used to be a less common name, even when I had a Gmail account before Gmail had a delete option. I had to settle for alissagrosso as my handle, which isn’t bad, but not nearly as cool as my old Lycos address.
Having an email address that’s simply my full name is not nearly as fun as people who have clever nickname emails, though I suppose it’s good for professional purposes. One memorable thing that came out of having my full name as my email address was when I first met Ron many moons ago. We “met” via an obscure online dating site, and at first were just communicating via messages on the site, but then he shared his email address with me. So, I sent him an email. Up until that point we had been on a first name only basis. So, it was a fun shock for him when he saw my full name in my email address. Fun, because for those of you that don’t know Ron’s last name is Gross, so just one letter different than mine, and if you go back a few generations his family’s last name is actually the same as mine, Grosso, only getting changed through some sort of Ellis Island switcheroo. So, I guess that couldn’t have happened with my old Lycosmail address. Though I think at some point that fun coincidence would have come to light anyway!
So for the forseeable future I will still be alissagrosso at my gmail account, and will still be muttering to myself as one of those storage alert emails comes in from Gmail, because I have no intention of reducing the staggering 144,088 emails currently sitting in my inbox any time soon. Don’t hate me, email minimalists!
— Alissa
P.S. A plant update. My deer tummy ache theory proved to be nothing more than silly optimism. Shortly after last week’s post the deer munched the Cordyline in the second planter right down to the stalk. This morning when checking on the planter I noticed that while the Cordyline had lost most of its leaves in the massacre it did have a new friend. A mushroom had sprung up in the planter. What can I say? It’s been pretty wet here.
Weekly Inspiration
What I’m Reading: System Collapse by Martha Wells
What I’m Watching: Sinners
What I’m Listening to: “Forever Young” by Bob Dylan
Find out more about my books at alissagrosso.com
Find out more about my art at alissacarin.com
My apologies for the typos and such this post is almost certainly riddled with.
I have multiple email accounts. Yahoo is my favorite as far as usability goes, though with every update they make it a little more like Gmail (which I loathe), and thus a little less user-friendly. (Which is how most tech seems to go--every iteration is a little worse!)
I most hate the email programs that save every back-and-forth exchange as an entire thread. So many times, I only want to save one message from the chain, not the whole chain.
What would we do without email?!
Hope all is well with all the rain in NJ.