Spring cleaning for e-mail

When it comes to life-changing milestones, e-mail is hard to beat. I still remember the first one I ever sent; it was to Saipan from the U.S. mainland. I had hooked a 9600 baud modem up to a battered old DOS laptop computer. I was about as surprised as a person can be when I actually got a reply to my e-mail: “It works! It works!”

Maybe that’s not as profound as Alexander Graham Bell’s “Mr. Watson, come here, I need you,” but, then again, maybe it is, given that phone calls between Saipan and the mainland were (as I recall) about a buck a minute back then.

After that first e-mail, I will confess I then sent out about a dozen frivolous e-mails to any address I could scrounge, just to enjoy getting a reply.

We all rode the e-mail bandwagon eventually. It was a free ride. It was a fun ride. Yes, it was—until it wasn’t. Then it wasn’t always fun, or necessarily free, as lost mail, spam, viruses, lost addresses, misdirected replies, and program crashes made “e-mail Hell” a common affliction.

So, where are we now? Well, for me, it’s Spring Cleaning time for e-mail, as I purge old addresses, old correspondence, and as I review my tangled nest of domains and addresses. I hate this stuff, so I really have to force myself to pay attention to it.

Here are my three big thoughts on the subject.

1. It is worth it to get your own domain name (it costs about $10 a year to register one) so you can tie down a permanent address in the cyber world. In other words, you, too, can be a dot-com, and base your e-mail addresses on your chosen and duly registered domain name. And even a simple, one-page web site for that domain gives you a way to post your contact information for the world to see, changeable at your whim. I have no idea why more people don’t do this; it’s the best bargain in communications.

2. In contrast to the above, if you don’t get your own domain name, your e-mail address will essentially be owned by somebody else. That someone else could be an employer, or a web-based e-mail service (e.g. Yahoo or Google), or your Internet service provider. But if things change, well, you’re out of luck. For example, many of us enjoyed our Hotmail addresses years ago, until Hotmail changed personalities, and many of us fled for other services; if all you had was a Hotmail address at the time, you were in bad shape.

3. Web-based email, such as Yahoo and Gmail, is, for many of us, more convenient to use than the old fashioned locally-kept mail, such as Outlook. I don’t know anything about Gmail. As for Yahoo, it’s great e-mail, and if you have a domain name you can run your e-mail through a Yahoo account if you pay a fee (and I do just that).

However, not all web-based e-mail works well, or is even usable, so don’t get fooled like I just did. I recently got a new cheapie host for a new domain, and I have discovered, to my horror, that their El Cheapo web mail service is utterly worthless.

I’m trying to use Outlook Express with that new domain to limp by for now, but it’s been a hit-or-miss proposition, and I’m sure some vital piece of correspondence is going to slip through the cracks and further ruin my already pathetic life. Lesson learned: Don’t try to save a few bucks on your e-mail service, the 3:30am headaches when you’re trying to troubleshoot things in a panic just aren’t worth it.

* * *

Many of us pretty much live online. We work, we get paid, we pay bills, we correspond, we invest, we shop, we bank, and we do research via the Internet. Yet, despite this trend, I know people who can’t manage to even be functionally literate with e-mail and related stuff. I’ve talked to about a half-dozen recent college graduates who are looking for work, yet don’t know what a domain name is, who can’t understand why their e-mail doesn’t work when they change ISPs, or who wonder why their dippy MySpace pages aren’t appropriate points of career contact.

Meanwhile, on the happier side of things, I’m also reviewing a book to share with you that highlights the growing importance of the Internet in some interesting ways. It’s a great book, and it will give us all something encouraging to think about in these lousy economic times. Stay tuned.

After all, Saipan, for all its economic woes, is still wired to the world, and this is a vital economic lifeline. Don’t ignore it. Embrace it. After all, it works! It works!