Hmm
So my gmail address is a very simple one. First initial, last name. I love having it, because it’s easy to tell people. No numbers, random letters, underscores. One downside to it is that for some reason a lot of other people think it’s their email address too. I’m not just talking spam — I get random personal emails and lots of e-commerce confirmations to my address.
What I do with these things depends a bit on my mood. If someone has used my email to sign up for something, sometimes I will go in and delete their account, or change their password to something random. Especially if it’s a myspace account. Personal emails I generally delete, after making sure it wasn’t really meant for me. Some of them make me feel bad, because they’re things like ‘here’s your son’s progress report’ or ‘do you want to go to the movies?’ and stuff people might actually miss.
So the other night I got a personal email for a girl (not me). It was from a job recruiter guy and said, basically, “Your dad told me you’re looking for a job, send me your resume and I can give it to the executive director at [Location]“. I read it, at first curious to see if it was actually a cleverly disguised piece of spam. But [Location] appeared to be a real place and the qualifications he listed seemed like real ones someone might have gotten from a person’s dad.
At that point I started to feel a little bad. Here’s this girl looking for a job, no easy task in today’s economy, and her dad cares enough to do a little networking for her — but somehow doesn’t actually know her email address.
Then I looked more closely at the email. I checked something on Facebook.
I realized I knew who the email was for.
And unlike my uncle, I actually know his daughter’s email address.
I have two gmail addresses. One is firstname.lastname and the other is the one you know based on the cats names.
I use the former for work stuff. I figure if I’m ever job hunting again, I could use it too. It auto-forwards to the latter. I don’t get other people’s emails though. With my maiden name, I used to get mix ups because there was an Elana Shenton in South Africa and I think there’s one in Austrailia. The one in S. Africa worked at IBM at the same time as I did and we’d often get cross circuited emails. It was actually a little weird considering my first name is Israeli since my mother’s side is Jewish, but my maiden last name is English, reflecting my father’s protestant background. Of course, I highly doubt there are many Israeli Elanas with my married French Canadian Catholic name. :)
(August 11th, 2009 at 4:41 am)
You never know!
I have some other gmail addresses too, but this is the one I mostly use. For a long time it was just to sign up for stuff, and most of what came to it was not quite spam, but not really important either. But I set my school email to forward to there now so I have to check it regularly.
(August 11th, 2009 at 3:32 pm)
I started using my gmail address more when Comcast webmail crapped out and I could no longer check my home email at work. I began to accidentally send more emails using my gmail account, then ppl got familiar with it and started emailing me there. Now I’m just in the habit of checking both all the time.
(August 15th, 2009 at 5:32 pm)
You should just have your comcast mail forward to your gmail account? Then you never have to remember to check both.
(August 17th, 2009 at 6:51 pm)
I do do that, but I don’t think it really takes the mail off the server until I retrieve it at home. With my OCD, it pains me to just leave it sitting there.
(August 20th, 2009 at 1:17 pm)