As of this week, for the first time since high school, I no longer pay for email. Yes, shocking as that may seem in the age of Gmail and free email access, I still had a [email protected] account that I actually paid for.
I got it back around 1998 or so, and it was my first email address. It was also the only one I’ve ever been quick enough to grab a Sandeepr email ID–I think there are too many Sandeeps in tech for that to ever happen again.
Even though I’ve had a gmail account for years, I only switched to using it regularly after I went to UC Santa Cruz. I still like reading my email in a dedicated mail program, and Gmail didn’t initially let you do that. In fact, none of the free email services did, which is why my USA.net email stuck around as long as it did…it was my personal email, and I used my various college email IDs mainly for work.
It’s been a slow transition, over the last few years, to make sure everyone knew I’d switched to a new email…that’s the difficulty in switching emails or phone numbers–you don’t want to lose touch with people in the process. Although Facebook and LinkedIn do make it easier to stay in touch without updating emails/phone numbers.
But it makes me a bit sad to give up my USA.net ID…I sent so many long personal emails from it, all long since lost to the ether. Before there were blogs or social networks, email was my blog and social network (although for a nice history of blogs, and particularly science blogs, see Bora Zivkovic’s post over at Scientific American Blogs). I sent everyone long, detailed accounts of everything that was going on in my life. This was of course back in college, when I had considerable amounts of free time…my emails were halfway between letters and blog posts. I tried continuing those long emails in grad school, but I soon became too busy, and while I still kept the USA.net account, it was relegated to secondary status.
I have fond memories of that time, and wish I had some of those old emails, particularly from when I first moved to the US and to college…I’m sure they would be interesting to re-read. I tried saving my emails for a few years, but the crappiness of CDs as storage media and the rapid changes in email software meant that I was always going to lose that battle. Of course, with Gmail and cloud storage, that’s something else that’s changed.
But those were interesting times, the late 90s/early 2000s. Pre-Google, at the height of Napster, when my PC was hand-built with components I ordered online. And in terms of my personal life as well, it felt like there was always something going on, something worth writing about–the end of high school, my college years…those were good times.
When I think of all the things that have changed since then, it’s amazing that I still had my USA.net account–it was truly a remnant of a bygone era. I guess that’s why I can’t get rid of it without feeling at least a little nostalgic…who knew an email ID could have so many memories associated with it!