On Email addresses

I went off to go backpacking around Ireland for what turned into a year or so in 1997, and I remember before I left having a conversation with my dad about how neat it would be if there was some sort of email service that you could access from anywhere on the internet, by just giving a user name and a password. I remember he said that he didn't think such a thing would work, because of the way that mail servers worked. Well, a month or two later, some Australians I ran into in a hostel told me about this great service called Hotmail. I still have that Hotmail address, and I'm proud to say that it doesn't have any numbers or opening and closing "xx"s (I've never understood that particular naming convention). Of course, over the years that address began to get more and more spam, and I've mostly retired it now. It's the email I use to sign up for things that require email addresses, but that's about all I use it for.

My primary email address today is a gmail one. I actually have two of them that I use reasonably frequently. One is my general purpose main email, and the other is one I use specifically for writing. It doesn't see a whole lot of use, but it gets some.

Coming to PSU has, of course, granted me another email, and then there's a Yahoo! one that I got just to sign up for a newsgroup, but I don't check either of those too often. The PSU email forwards to my main gmail account, while the Yahoo! one just gathers dust in the hall closet of the internet.

Forwarding of emails and gmail's excellent filtering and labeling system makes it quite easy to maintain multiple email addresses without the hassle of having to check them all all the time, though hotmail and some other web based email clients won't forward mail unless you have a paid account with them--a petty but probably fairly effective tactic to ensure that the people who get their email for free at least have to look at ads.

The (I would guess fairly common) phenomenon of having an email address specifically for signing up for things has interesting implications for online marketing: When we collect an email address, we have to ensure that we're going to provide content that is interesting enough to people that they will want to have it delivered to their primary email address, if possible. It's very likely that newsletters that get sent to the spam addresses just languish unread in the inbox until they are purged in a massive fit of "select all; delete." The hard part, of course, is generating that compelling content.