1717: The Story of Your Mail Archive

During a quiet — and, I won’t lie, somewhat bored — moment today, I decided to take a look back in my GMail archive and see exactly when I started using that account. I’ve had a number of different email accounts over the years, some of which have lasted longer than others, but I had a feeling that GMail had stuck with me longer than anything else. (Except perhaps for Hotmail, which I keep around to sign up for things I don’t want to sign up my “real” email address for. And for my Xbox Live account, because in Microsoft’s wisdom, they don’t allow you to change the email address associated with your account, meaning I was forever stuck with it, not that email really matters to Xbox Live anyway.)

Sure enough, my GMail account has been with me for somewhere in the region of four or five years or so. Prior to that, I made use of a .mac/MobileMe/iCloud account (the name has changed several times since I opened the account in 2007 as part of my employment at the Apple Store), and before that, I was using Yahoo. Prior to that, I was using various different proprietary addresses that I got with Internet service providers, and since I moved every year while I was at university — and quite frequently thereafter, too — I changed email address a lot, much to, as I recall, the annoyance of my brother, who never knew which address to contact me on.

Anyway, I digress; my GMail account hails from 2009, and it was interesting to take a look back to what was going on in my life around then. I can use this blog for that too, of course — and often do, as narcissistic as that might sound — but looking back at past emails is a little different because it’s not just a record of my thoughts spilling out on the page as I saw fit to express them; it’s my thoughts spilling out on the page as I saw fit to express them to another specific person.

As those of you who have been reading this blog for a few years will recall, 2010 was Not A Good Year for Pete, and indeed the early pages of my email history reflect that to a certain degree.

Before that, however, was an email from a former colleague containing nothing but this image:

It still makes me giggle.

Anyway, the first few pages of my GMail are actually made up of messages imported from my .mac/MobileMe account, which I was running in parallel with GMail for some time (and indeed still am, though I don’t really use it any more). In those early messages, I can see the first time I was hired as a professional games journalist — Joey Davidson and Brad Hilderbrand were good enough to take a chance on me and hire me for the now sadly defunct Kombo.com. The pay was crap, but it was something at a time when I had nothing else, and I got something far more valuable out of that experience: friends. People I still speak to today — indeed, just today I had a quick chat with Joey via instant message, which was nice.

Around that time, I was preparing for a trip to PAX East in Boston, at which I’d have the opportunity to meet a number of members of the Squadron of Shame for the first time — and to catch up with some I’d had the pleasure of meeting once or twice before. I was also looking forward to the opportunity to cover a big event as a journalist, though sadly I wasn’t enough of a bigshot at this time to be able to score a proper press badge, and as such had to write about things at the show largely from a consumer perspective.

Shortly after my return from PAX East, you may recall that my life fell to pieces, and you can see almost the exact moment this happens, since there’s a sudden flurry of sympathetic messages from friends and family alike. Thus began a very dark period in my life, and one that still, I must admit, brings tears to my eyes to relive, even when looking at it through the cold, clinical view of plain text.

So let’s not do that.

Instead, fast forward a bunch of pages and I was very surprised to spot an email from a familiar name: Shahid Ahmad, who is now best known as Sony’s most enthusiastic employee, and champion of the Vita. Shahid apparently commented on one of my posts somewhere — I can’t quite tell where from the email exchange, but it was a post about the game Mr. Robot, which I recall enjoying a great deal — and we’d evidently had a discussion about Chimera, a game which he made back in the days of the Atari 8-bit and Commodore 64 home computers, and which he has trying to remake ever since. (He was talking about a remake a while back on Twitter; apparently, he’s been trying to make this happen since at least 2010.)

Somewhere around the 37,000 email mark (still in 2010), I seemingly start using GMail a bit more for communicating with people and signing up for things. There’s still a bunch of stuff coming in via MobileMe, but messages without that tag are starting to appear more and more.

Around the 35,000 email mark, I start working for GamePro. Of all the sites I’ve worked on over the years, I think GamePro is the one that I think of most fondly and am most proud of. I feel I struck a good balance with my news coverage, and there was tangible proof that I — specifically me — was responsible for bringing in a significant amount of new traffic with the work I was doing. Unfortunately, this seemingly wasn’t enough to prevent the site from being unceremoniously wiped off the face of the planet some time later, but it was nice to know at least.

Aside from my own developments, it’s also interesting to see what names I still know today have been up to over the years. It’s nice to see Tom Ohle of Evolve PR’s name crop up a bunch of times, for example — that man’s one of the hardest-working PR folks in the business, and also someone who always put across the impression of genuinely believing in the games he was representing — as well as folks I’ve worked alongside moving from outlet to outlet.

And then, of course, there’s the first appearance of Andie in my Twitter direct messages (Twitter’s email notifications used to look a whole lot different!) and… well, we all know what happened there. (She’s sleeping upstairs in the house we own together right now as I write this.)

So anyway. Having rambled on for over a thousand words about nothing more than my email archives, I think I’m ready to call that a night. It’s been an interesting trip back along memory lane — not always pleasant or comfortable, but certainly interesting — but I think I’ve sated my curiosity for now, at least.

So what’s the earliest email you still have, dear reader?

#oneaday Day 540: Googlopoly

It’s strange how the dominance of some companies (Facebook, Activision and, occasionally, Apple) is seen as a negative influence, yet in other cases (Google, Valve and, occasionally, Apple) their prevalence is seen as very much a Good Thing. This is particularly apparent when it comes to looking at Google and what it offers to the denizens of the Web.

Up until a while back, I’d flitted between various email addresses on a semi-regular basis thanks to moving house a lot and getting a new broadband connection in every house. New connection from whichever company had the best deal at the time meant new email address, and it became a running joke between my brother and I that I would eventually get to the point where I’d have an email address for every day of the week.

Fortunately, I managed to nip that in the bud, first with a Yahoo account and then with a MobileMe (formerly .mac) account which, I hasten to add, I got for free during the time I worked at Apple (and a little while afterwards due to them apparently not figuring out I didn’t work for them any more until almost a year later — wish they’d carried on paying me, too, that would have been nice). Anyway. I ditched the Yahoo account because of the ridiculous amount of spam it attracted, and Yahoo’s spam filters are beyond awful. I used MobileMe and was quite happy with it for a while, as I hadn’t used an IMAP account before and it proved to be very useful, particularly when the iPhone came along.

But then I discovered GMail, and since then, I find it very difficult to understand a couple of things: firstly, why people are resistant to Google when it offers a usability experience of such an order of magnitude better than everything else on the market; and secondly, why more people haven’t just ripped off Google’s ideas wholesale.

Take something as simple as the way you manage your inbox. It’s very easy for one’s inbox to become completely flooded with bullshit, with unread counts tumbling (err, upwards) into the thousands, particularly if you’re subscribed to any mailing lists or get sent endless press releases. It’s tempting to select all and delete everything, but you just know that if you do that, you’ll really need one of those emails at some point in the near future. You could file it, too, but then you run into the problem of getting increasingly obsessive-compulsive about your filing systems, wondering if a “Friends” folder is good enough or whether you’d rather subdivide it into individual friends… and so on. But no — in GMail, we have the wonder that is the Archive button, which makes the email go away but doesn’t delete it. That way, you can find it by searching, but it doesn’t clutter up your inbox any more. Genius.

And talking of searching, the most frustrating thing about MobileMe Mail’s otherwise pretty good web interface is the fact that you can only search one folder at a time. This is absolutely useless if you want to use it for the purpose of finding out which fucking folder you put that really important email in. In GMail, it’s a snap.

You can download all attachments at once. You can preview files in your web browser. You can set up your browser to redirect mailto: links to GMail rather than your soon-to-be-defunct mail client. And the fact it’s web-based means that you can get at it from anywhere.

And this, of course, is just GMail. I have to confess that I haven’t used some of Google’s other services such as Google Calendar a great deal, but I have been spending some time with both Google+ and Google Docs, and frankly we’re at a stage now where, for the average user, standalone productivity software is nigh-on irrelevant. Assuming you have an Internet connection — and with broadband and 3G adapters so affordable now, chances are you do — then you have access to all your stuff from anywhere.

The downside, of course, is if your Internet connection fails, or if Google’s servers fall over (like they did the other night when they ran out of disk space on the server which stored G+ notification emails) then you could have a problem. But in my time using Google’s various services so far, I’ve never had a problem so serious it compromised my productivity — and most of the time, it’s fixed within a matter of minutes or even seconds at times.

Most importantly, though, I don’t feel like Google wants to be my sole window onto the Web, which is where I think it differs from Facebook in quite a key way. Zuckerberg’s Facebook wants to be the only destination that people will ever need on the Web — hence all the apps, brand pages, games and other bollocks that clutters up the once-clean and simple service. Google, on the other hand, wants to help me out with things I need to do, and then set me loose on the rest of the Web — perhaps sharing some of the cool things I find via G+. It facilitates rather than dictates, and for that reason, barring them doing something really, really stupid I predict that Google services will be a big part of my online life for some time to come.

#oneaday Day 90: You’ll Never Win

Got an iPhone or some sort of portable telecommunications device which supports push notifications? Take a look at its home screen and count how many notifications you’ve got. Not counting emails, I have 39, and I know the second I go through all those apps and “clear” them, they’ll be back with a vengeance.

The same is true with emails. My inbox count on my iPhone has been hovering at somewhere around the 650-700 mark for a long time now, and there seems to be absolutely no way to shrink it down. My GMail button in Chrome claims I have 948 messages, but I think that’s the total in my inbox, not unread. And like the notifications, I know that as soon as I batter the shit out of my inbox and get that number down to something approaching zero (it can never be zero, because there’s always at least one message you find that you think “I’ll just leave that in my inbox, I might want to refer to that later”, conveniently forgetting the fact you have labels, folders and a search facility) those messages will be back to haunt me. Well, not those same messages, but some new ones.

It’s the age of Web 2.0 that has done this to us, of course. The fact that we get bombarded with messages from various social networks on a minute-by-minute basis, everything vying for our attention (when in fact most of these emails are asinine, vapid crap that we really don’t need — who gives a fuck if someone just commented on a photo you were tagged in? Check it later.) and, in many cases, causing the important stuff to get lost.

I remember back in the CompuServe days, receiving an email was A Big Deal (particularly if it was from Julia, at least until The Incident) because it didn’t necessarily happen every day. Largely because not everyone Had The Internet, because some people didn’t have a modem, or others were concerned about phone bills, or whatever. But at that time — oh, that golden time — you were lucky to get five emails a week, and certainly none inviting you to extend your penis with Biblical quotes (and no, sadly I’m not making that up).

I guess the solution would be, of course, to turn off notifications and to stop Twitter, Facebook and whatever else from emailing me every time someone in my network does ANYTHING… but then how will I know that someone just tagged me in 300 photos? (With an email for every photo, obv.)

In other news, it’s probably about time I cleaned out my aforementioned GMail inbox. I’m going in… if you don’t hear from me in 3 hours I’ve probably died.