Today and email domains...

Today was very laid back, spent the day in the basement watching baseball and messing around on the internet.  Watch my wedding video with my grandparents when they stopped by and also saw my aunt and uncle and their three boys.

I uncovered an old computer case in a different section of the basement and got it fired up after putting an old power supply in it and have been tinkering with it for a few hours.  I'm not sure what i'll do with it, maybe just put Ubuntu on it and file it away until someone needs a backup computer.

My email addresses have evolved like this:
At one time Altavista used to give free ad-supported dial-up, so when I was in 8th grade i think, we started getting that.  Then they discontinued their free access so....

We started getting NetZero, which was great at first, then they "nerfed" their free internet to something like 10 free hours a month and they would kick you off AND they would pop up an ad every 5-10 minutes that you had to click on or you get logged off.  The non-crappy version lasted for a few months then the crappy version lasted for one month until we started paying for their monthly unlimited.  I'm so glad we never used AOL....

I'm pretty sure I used my Netzero account for quite a while then I realized that it was based on paying them every month and if the money stopped so did all the access to your massive quota maxing collection of 10 megabytes of emails stored on their server, so I signed up for a Hotmail account.  I transitioned most into that account and never really used the Netzero again, I think about that same time I signed up for a Yahoo account but didn't really use it and then ultimately ended up becoming a junk email account (and still is...).  The Hotmail account died about two years ago, it hung around a while, I'd keep logging in to see if it was still active every 6 months which probably prolonged it longer than it should have.


That lasted all through high school and my first year of college...(I'll have to write a post sometime chronicling the evolution my P2P downloading)

Then I moved into a place in Plattsburgh for my third semester that had Verizon's DSL (I never had a verizon email address). However, this is when news of Google's email first started popping up and I signed up to be notified, but I think I got an invite from someone.  I switched over to that pretty much instantly and forwarded all my other accounts to it or just closed them down (Except for the Yahoo one which doesn't let you forward unless you pay for it...so it drifted into obscurity only to be checked when I sign up for some junk software thing and need to confirm an address or something).  Now I have about 2.5 gigs of every email message I've ever sent or received sitting out in cyberspace somewhere being analyzed by some tracking computer to see what ads it wants to feed me in hopes that I'll click on them an buy something.  Well, that's at the very least...

So, thank you to my wife for bringing up this trip down memory lane...

Long story short, I think yahoo is ok for email, it just doesn't have the features that Gmail gives me for free. At least it's not a Hotmail address OR the worst of them all an @AOL.com address.  For some reason I put Yahoo above Hotmail.

I also think .edu address are on a sliding scale, yea it's cool to use them when you're a student, but if you graduated 5 years ago it might be time to upgrade, i think most schools cut you off anyway.  Maybe I'm just scarred by the awful interfaces that the .edu webmail had and with the amount that I check my email I don't really want to be reminded 15 times a day that I paid a ton of money to and spent 4 years of my life there.