ScribbledBabbling.com

Please indulge me as I just needed to get this off my chest.

I’ve had my Yahoo! email address since 1997, more than 10 years now. So for the longest time, this is my default email address. I have emails from long-time friends in my inbox at this address and I still am getting the occasional email though here as well. I keep mahBebe’s emails from the time that we were still in the process of getting to know each other with a distance of 13101km between us. I have emails from my closest friends with stories from our first forays into the corporate world and the perils of graduate school. The emails that I chose to keep in that account are not just a few bytes of data, they are chronicles of the time when we were still discovering our passions, naive, idealistic and so full of wonder with all the things that have happened to us.

Now, that mailboxes mostly receives updates from acquaintances who I only know because of their online personas. It has become a dumping group for group subscriptions and mailing lists. Before, it contained emails that let me connect with the details of my friends lives. Now, all I have to look forward to are the words and cartoons of the day. There are still updates coming from my friends but these are few and far in between. I get glimpses of their day from their Facebook or Multiply updates but nothing that really feels like an intimate conversation on their feelings and thoughts.

For the past few days, Ive been getting a lot of spam emails not in my spam folder but in my inbox. There is just so much clutter that I need to clear out before I can get to the important emails. Most of the time, spam emails number more than the legitimate emails.

I have several mailboxes scattered across the web that I use for different purposes. Of course, I have a Gmail account that’s for business concerns — other than my day job that is. My Hotmail account is primarily for those subscriptions that can wait. I also have the mailboxes of my domain accounts, messenger accounts, etc. So much stuff and information that literally gives me a headache when I start sorting them out. Given that I feel that my primary Yahoo! account is attracting so much clutter, I’m thinking of shutting it down and moving the important stuff to my other accounts.

Moving it means that I will have to inform people to update their address books not just with my email address but also my YM account. I would need to migrate my contacts list as well and update memberships where I used my primary Yahoo! email as the sign up credential. Which will bring me more grief? Getting inundated with tons of spam every single day or changing my whole online identity?

I can’t believe that I’m letting my annoyance get to me. I’ve had the email address for 12 years and to contemplate shutting it down is such a struggle for someone like me who has a hard time letting go of anything.

I started this entry really as a way to vent out my frustration with my mailbox and it turned out as a somewhat-nostalgia piece. Now I feel like going through the old mail in my inbox to relive the days gone by.