Please Forward

My old personal email address died over the weekend.

It’s kind of the end of an era. I’ve had that address since around 1998, after all. It was the second non-school address I’d ever owned.

The first one was an address I got from a local provider in the next town south of us a couple of years earlier. It was one of those things where you brought your desktop computer down to this brick and mortar store and they configured it for you on the spot, and then they sent you an annual bill. It never really worked right, though. One time I remember bringing my computer back to the store to complain about the lack of functionality and the boss of the store was there at the time. He got mad at me. “Why is it always my fault?” he asked me. “I don’t know, Matt,” I told him. “Precedent?”

So when a new brick and mortar store selling email services opened up a couple of blocks from where Kim and I were living, we switched.

It’s been a while since then. They were the local provider that hosted my first blog, which ran from 1999-2004. It hosted the web site for the homemade soap business that Kim and I ran from 1998-2005, and for which I still get credit card offers. Got one last week, in fact, along with a solicitation from a recruiting firm to look for workers to help us market soap that we haven’t made since the Bush years.

The provider moved away from that local shop more than a decade ago. Maybe two decades. It eventually ended up a few towns north of us.

And it’s been slowly dying on the vine for much of that time.

My original plan was to keep the address until my mother passed away, since she was the main person who used it by then, but even after that there were always more pressing things to do and it was never really a priority. I eventually compiled a list of about 90 accounts that were keyed to that address, though, and last summer I started moving them over to my new email address – at least the ones that I felt were worth moving, which was about a third of them. I don’t need the local public schools to have my email anymore, for example, or the 4H. Those have served their purposes. But the ones that still had some utility I moved over, bit by bit.

I haven’t been able to send email from that address for about three years now – a long story involving a pile of settings that even my internet-savvy friend who does this sort of thing for a living could never quite sort out – and nobody’s been able to access my first blog since long before the pandemic, but until this year I could still at least receive email and then respond to it from a different account. That stopped without notice New Year’s Day and didn’t return until a couple of weeks ago, and even that rather fitfully. I’m down to about five or six accounts I still need to switch, but a couple of them I can do in person here in Our Little Town. The others I’ll have to call. On the phone. With my voice. Because I am old.

My internet-savvy friend has been trying to buy out the provider for a while now in order to salvage it and keep it running. There aren’t many of these old local providers left anymore in the age of gmail, and it’s good to have some local options. But the owner refused to respond to any phone calls, emails, or smoke signals, and by all accounts seems happy to squat on the IP and do nothing with it.

So when I got my annual bill – a relic of a bygone past – I figured it was time to let it go.

I’ve joined the mob over at gmail now. If you still have the old address you should ask me for the new one. I still haven’t quite figured out how gmail works, but fewer and fewer people use email at all these days anyway so I figure I’ve got time.

In the grand scheme of things it’s hardly a ripple, but it feels sort of elegiac.