Wow. I guess it has been that long. I will now reflect briefly upon my history with the communicative medium of electronic mail.
I first opened a Hotmail account as I was getting ready to leave college and the .edu address that was the only one I'd ever had. I spent a fair amount of time forwarding key messages to my new account so I could have them later. Ever with an eye on personal history, that was me.
Then I got my first post-college job, complete with a .com address, and of course there was no way I needed more than one email!--so I abandoned Hotmail for a while.
I later came around to the notion that having more than one email account was OK, particularly if one was personal and one a work account. The fact that the company owned the work account was not immediately important to me; I just wasn't thinking in those terms. If it had my name on it, it was mine, right?
When I decided that having a personal account as well made sense (there's no dramatic story there about how I got in trouble for sending personal messages from the company account or anything, I just gradually started to think more about the lines between the different parts of life), the Hotmail account I'd set up was still there, so of course I went back to it.
Unfortunately, it had been more than 6 months, or a year, or whatever the time limit was, since the last time I'd logged in, so all my carefully forwarded messages had been deleted. (Storage space was a bigger deal back in the day, you will recall, and they had these rules to keep things lean and tidy.)
Siiiigh. There went my extensive college correspondence, with all my youthful ramblings about classes and work plans and what family members were up to back home and so on. I still regret losing that.
The lesson is, make backups. Or don't trust technology. Or log into your email accounts at least once every six months. Or that memory is fleeting. Or something.
But despite this crushing disappointment, I kept using the Hotmail account because it seemed to work OK and I already had the address set up. I was still interested in keeping the number of accounts I had to check low.
Later I added another address for listservs and such, and a Gmail account when those were new and exciting, and I picked up a couple more .edu addresses, and changed jobs, so at the moment I have at least seven email accounts for various sections of my life that I check...sometimes, anyway.
One of them remains this first Hotmail account, because habit. Also I have about a zillion saved messages in it, and everyone has the address in their address books already and it's so hard to send an update to get them to change it!
Besides, Hotmail has served me well enough for the past 10+ years. We'll see if I'm still using this account after another 10+.
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