MailMan

One of the people who occasionally comments on this blog goes by the nom de blog of 'golightly'. I always smile when I see that, because the word reminds me of spring, and lightness, and also of Holly Golightly, of Breakfast at Tiffany's fame. I've never seen that film, but its another case of just sounding great. Who couldn't like a name like that? I wanted to tell her this, and that I really like her blog picture (its her and her young son, looking way cuter than the average bear), but her email option only hooks to Yahoo mail, which doesn't (apparently) interconnect with my email ids (the standard one which collects responses to this blog, or the Gmail one, which I have for reasons that escape me at the moment). So, I signed up for a free yahoo email id, and now I have three.

It brought to mind the Microsoft Passport, which I thought of the other day when I was reading an article about an effort to create a neutral ID registration authority. The idea, as I understood it, was that this agency would authenticate you (yes, you are authentic!), and from there on, for however long, any authentications needed would be done behind the scenes. It wouldn't literally be a one-id signon, which Passport was supposed to be, but it would have the same effect. I don't know why Passport didn't work, globally; in my case, it was that I didn't trust Microsoft, as a rule, and I didn't trust that the system would remain secure. I still think that, both about Passport and about this neutral authority. And then there's the gotchas as some bright young person seeks to monetize this. Why, every time someone signs onto our site, we can just pop up ads here and there, very unobtrusive.... guaranteed eyeballs on screen!!! Likely? Who knows. I wouldn't want to take the chance.

What brings this to mind is thinking that Gee, with this third email, what're the chances that I'll actually get mail there and not know about it? Pretty slim, but possible. The other day I got a note from one of the two people that I thought I had slimed, saying that she wasn't intentionally ignoring me, but had had to drop out of sight for a while to clean up some messy familial problems (as if her family was more important than me; imagine!); one of the side effects of that dropout was that she wasn't looking at one email account, and was surprised to find the note from me when she did get back to it. Which in turn reminded me of something I'd read to the effect that one organize-your-life guru recommended cleaning out your email in box on a routine basis, as a way of keeping things nice and orderly; this writer said that if the idea was to handle everything when it showed up, fine, but that did make you a slave of the inbox (Omigod, forty eight more emails, gotta get them done!); and if the idea of keeping things N&O was to slot them into folders as they arrive, then you tended to lose any awareness of what the important ones were. The writer said he intentionally left his inbox messy, treating it as a personal to-do list, and only filing once they were handled (even if one of the filing options was File 13, and how did we get to calling trash File13 anyway?). My attitude was a combination; emails that I would get routinely, with keywords, got autofiled; ones that I didn't recognize, I'd look at (except the ones with great titles like Increase Your Penile Prowess!!!!, somehow, I didn't think I would benefit from reading them).

So, with all of this shuckin' and jivin' going on in three different email accounts (and thats just my blog-related accounts; I have two others - one with my actual name as part of the address, used for personal emails from people I know or trust, and one that is a variant of my name, used as the general purpose and spam-catcher for our family), I wondered; is there a market for a one-size-fits-all email box? It all goes into its individual email accounts, gets sorted, shuffled, shucked, jived, minced and chopped according to the rules set up for those boxes, and eventually forwarded to the One Big Email box that I actually do look at? Something that would say Ah! A note from Golightly on Yahoo Mail, leave me create a response here that goes back to that email account there and sends it as if I'd signed directly onto it?

Man, you'd think I get a lot of mail, or something.