Dot coms and Detox

I've always been a little bit behind where technology is concerned and that my husband is always a little bit ahead doesn't provide much incentive to change my sluggish ways.

And I don't know if the fact that I have FOUR email addresses makes me savvy or stupid--but I'll save that analysis for another day.

In my mind, however, they aren't really four separate email addresses (even though, according to my husband, they really are). That's because there is this function/application/protocol, POP (Post Office Protocol), which magically makes everything go to one account. It uses a lot of this stuff:

+OK POP3 server ready <1896.697170952@dbc.mtview.ca.us>
C:    APOP mrose c4c9334bac560ecc979e58001b3e22fb
S:    +OK mrose's maildrop has 2 messages (320 octets)

Which means absolutely NOTHING to me, but it looks a lot like what my husband is getting a Master Degree in (ugh, I know) from "The" Johns Hopkins University (okay, that's pretty cool).

The great thing is, those of us who only use %>: to make smiley faces at the end of our sentences or maybe Snoopy and Woodstock if we're really clever, don't need to know what it means or how to use it. People at google or hotmail or yahoo know for us. :)

I don't know if ignorance is bliss, but it sure is nice to not have to know everything (who am I kidding? OF COURSE we know everything, but you know what I mean).

So, of those four email addresses that I have, three of them go to one address. So see? I really only have two email addresses.

The fourth (does anyone use hotmail anymore?) was the first email address I EVER had. I "secured" it close to 10 years ago, or thereabouts, and it has retired from its cyber hey-days as the go-to account and now works exclusively in the "all things that require registration" sector--online purchases, newspaper access, magazine recipe access, daily doctor dictionary words. In other words, it is the email used for all things that are not authentically or specifically designed for moi.

The evolution of email has included the provision of (basically) unlimited storage space, which has not always been the case. And I take full advantage. Like my house, my closet, my drawers: if there's space, you can bet I know how to fill it up and then I know how to lament it until I (or in the case of the pantry, Pete) do something about it.

Well, my "all things that require registration" inbox was borderline hotline-able. It was holding (ready for this?) 3,741 UNREAD emails. I'm sure there is some advocacy group somewhere that could make a strong case for neglect, even gluttony. Swift and severe detoxification was in order if I was to avoid exile from email.

But where to start?

I don't know why it didn't occur to me sooner, but most emails now have a search function. So after like 8 pages of clicking on each individual message (or getting so fed up I just selected them all and prayed it wouldn't somehow haunt me when it was finally my turn in line at the department of motor vehicle --because it seems like everything I do has implications where that agency is concerned) I finally had the bright idea to type in the sender's name in the search line and see every email from them appear.

In most cases, I could just check "select all" and then click on delete.

After an hour of methodically moving down the line, I was left with just 150 READ emails in my inbox--most from the days when my hotmail account was my only account and my now husband and father of our daughter was my (only) high-school graduating boyfriend.

But now I've decided that those people who know a lot about that <: ref::! stuff, need to come up with a way for us to conveniently and one-clickly "unsubscribe" to those senders at the same time we're deleting the 500 emails from them we've never opened. Wouldn't THAT be fancy. ::

Mid-week Splurge

Still enjoying birthday leftovers--mostly cupcakes and cookies. I promise pictures and descriptions will come this week. There, I wrote it down (and I just said it out loud).