Email Bankruptcy
I sent my first electronic message on the JCCC Coin in about 1987 or 88. It wasn’t an email exactly, just a way to leave messages for other users of the BBS. It was closer to like a sticky note, sometimes you got the message and sometimes you didn’t. I got an email account when I signed up for KCNET, although I never ever checked it. When Quantum became America Online I really began to see the use case for email, but it was mostly a novelty. I didn’t like that it required a third party like AOL and your ISP to use. I registered my first domain name in 1997 and with it came my first branded email address. It wasn’t long until that was my full-time business. I was trying to sell amazing websites to dynamic companies but what got me in the door was email. My very first paying customer, in 1995, paid me to fax them their email… and would do until 2003!
You have to remember, in those days, just running into somebody else with email was pretty rare. There were no email addresses on the business cards. Customer service was a phone number. All your friends, even if they had a computer, preferred to pick up a wired phone and call you. Just having a real person to send an email to was exciting, as exciting as the business prospects of direct communication. In the late 90s email was like business lubrication and everybody was trying to figure out how to use it. Everything about email was useful and I began to collect email addresses in earnest. There were the “Webmaster” accounts and the “Admin” accounts not to mention the crazy personal addresses and trap accounts. I got Gmail in 1999 and quickly began funneling all those spigots into one place because that’s where the business was. But by the turn of the Millennium, I knew I was in trouble.
In 2000 I had to do my first direct mail email campaign. It was good, they had asked for more information at a trade show and the company I was working for sent it. That’s the way it should work. I was getting a thousand emails a day personally and professionally, but it was all manageable. We got macros and filters and autoresponders and things began to organize themself. In 2006 I sent more email that was automated than I personally attended to. And the email kept coming. Systems evolved, bandwidth grew, and soon I was getting BACN and SPAM in torrents. Some of the messages I saw some I didn’t, late, buried, and smothered I trudged through thousands and thousands of messages every hour. Looking for something… Trying to find… Did you see the email about…
By the time it all got funneled into my hand with a smartphone in 2007. I was done. Long gone was the cheerful “You’ve Got Mail” as was any notification or acknowledgment at all. I didn’t want to know. It was work, more stress. “I’ll deal with it later.” But increasingly later never came. There was a river of communication in my pocket and I just didn’t care. By 2010 email had become a nuisance, and that’s where it remains.
I still send email and I read some of it. I do, it just doesn’t look like it at the moment. I download and read all the headers to know where I stand in the world. But most of the email accounts that I’ve had are ghost accounts now, and most of the correspondence I do these days is via other means. So, I’m declaring email bankruptcy. If you know R. Josh Quarles and your email address for him isn’t from this domain. DON’T USE IT. This domain will serve as my definitive point of contact moving forward. The contact page has all the pertinent details. All those old accounts have to go!
