Gee, Mail!

Perhaps we're a bit quirky when it came to choosing a name for our email account - but given the number of people connected online even 10 years back we already had a tough time getting a unique email address that reflected our name without needing to put in numbers. Initials couldn't work, first and family name combinations were also taken, and seeing how we gone through life using our first name rather than our Chinese name we didn't bother trying an email address using our full Chinese name.

Under those circumstances, we thought: perhaps a rather unique name using two words from our initials. And that did the trick. Came up with a 15-letter email address. Even when we fill in forms now, there's the risk that the forms don't provide enough boxes. :P

Probably that singular email was enough. But spam mail being spam mail, somehow, just somehow, they manage to find our longish email. Sigh. But unlike our first email account (yes we did start off with a short initial-plus-numbers combination email) that got overrunned by spam, this one only saw a minute trickle of spam mail trickling in.

Pays to keep a few email account then, we thought. And so we thought up another unique email address, instead of using the same email name on different email providers. Initially we meant for the new email as a correspondence email for our uni batchmates while keeping the old one for college and school friends. Just why the segregation, we can't explain now.

Ended up with a 13-letter email name under a few email providers. Can't really say why, maybe it was because we wanted to make sure no one used that email name under a different provider. Kiasu, yes. And we delegated different duties for each email address too. One for stuff online that required registration and wasn't important, one for basic correspondence and because it's linked to a certain IM, one because we were invited and provided the most space when it first launched (heh), one for our Discworld stuff, and oh, one more for e-cards.

This is a bit of a hassle really - given just how anal we are when it comes to our contact lists. Full names where possible, nicknames/quicknames, multiple email addresses. And we're talking for four email accounts that we commonly use.

So...our point being?

Over time we've made the transition from Hotmail to GMail. Because GMail has been getting better and better. From compiling email correspondences together so that they look like a forum posting called conversations (which is very neat and user-friendly), to being able to label certain conversations for reference (webchitect told us about this, we never used that function before), that they automatically save all emails sent (something Hotmail neglected to do initially), to being able to perform a search through all emails...

List of good points just go on and on now. But it's the 'conversations' bit, still so far unique to GMail, that's the important advantage that pulled us over to GMail. Especially when it comes to planning an event, where everyone starts emailing in and it really looks like a forum board - except that if you aren't using GMail, be prepared to receive some 20+ emails if you haven't been logging on frequently.

Didn't help as topics tend to get off track from the subject on hand, heh heh. As how the boardgamecafe members would say, "Thread kena hijacked". And last week, for the first time ever, we had a GMail conversation go over 100 replies. :S

Incidentally, quite recently we came across yet another reason to switch to GMail. GMail Mobile. It's basically an application that we downloaded onto our phone to view GMail. Prior to this we were occasionally viewing our mail on a WAP format using our L'Amour that, while it allowed us to view the mail text, wasn't pretty, nor organized. But we didn't know any better until Fiesty Freddie introduced us to the GMail application he used. Now, we know. :)

Ends up we're now quite stuck on GMail, at times leaving a tab open for it. Not only we use the GTalk (and GMail even saves the conversations automatically!), but because we don't even have to refresh the page in order to be notified of any email updates. Hat's off to Google.

Rest of the email accounts? Still alive, still alive. After all, we still need an email for registering accounts from websites that may just end up sending us spam mail.