So, you know how you tend to accumulate email addresses. You’ve got a couple of old, free Yahoo! mailboxes (one for spam, one for porn), old Hotmail mailboxes (for your alias), and the dreaded “insightbb.com” or “sbcglobal” mailboxes that came with your Internet that you used, but not as your primary address, because that’s how they hook you!
Yeah, if you’re not using them, you should probably delete them. I went back and checked one after about 15 years. It had over 100,000 emails. It’s so overloaded that just opening one to delete it takes forever. Judging by the subject lines, however, I’ve lost 79,000 relatives to industrial accidents or car wrecks in Nigeria, and I’ve won the European lottery about 49,000 times. There’s probably at least one really cool job offer, or a letter from a venture capital firm wanting to buy out Indy In-Tune, or some other hidden treasure that I never saw, but might have changed my life if only I’d checked this account at least once in the last five years.
As it is, I can’t take time to sift through it. Therefore, if you’ve ever sent me an email that I didn’t respond to, it’s probably lost in there and about to hit the recycle bin of my sordid past. Somewhere tomorrow, the one lowly sysadmin still charged with watching that last GTE mail server for Motorolla … or US Sprint … or T-Mobile or whoever owns them now is going to be all freaked out that his disks went from 98% capacity to almost empty overnight.
