Two Minutes Hate

Email Address Changers

Do you have friends or relatives that change their email addresses constantly? I do, some of them seem to change their address 3 or 4 times a year. It is so annoying. To me the whole point of having an email address is that it will always be there. Even if you haven't talked to the person in a year, you should be able to reasonably hope that their email address is the same.

There are times when you have to change email addresses - when enter the witness protection program, you change jobs, graduate from school, somehow your email provider screws up your account (this happened to me with my original Yahoo account and it ended up being much easier just to start over), new features on one system work better with your cell phone, etc...

There are reasons to change...but the people who constantly change do not have good reasons. Here are the trends that I have noticed.

• They tend to use their ISP's assigned email address. This is fine if you plan on staying with your internet service provider for a long period...but they bounce around from ISP to ISP trying to take advantage of every little promotion to save 50 cents. Get an ISP and stick with it or go to a web based email. Web based is so easy and in many ways better. Every time you change it causes me more than 50 cents worth of annoyance and after the third time I am probably just going to remove you from my address book because you aren't worth it.

• They don't really think out their email name. Did you really think that "HotLover69XXX" was a good user name? You feel comfortable sending your mom or a business an email with an address like that? That is actually tame compared to some that I have received from customers at work but you know what I mean. Most likely you probably won't want this username forever. Sure it is fine to have as a specific purpose email like if you hang out at adult friend finder or something...but it seems a little narrow minded for general use. But people also include their girl/boy friend's names (Rachel_Jim@...) or a host of other stupid narrow minded mistakes. I guess that wouldn't be too bad if you were married but if you have been going out for a few weeks, I don't see it as practical...plus it is not like email accounts are hard to come by, you can each get your own. Personally, I find it easy to use first and last name or initial and last name or some form thereof. It won't always work for everyone but some combination will work for most.

• Their inbox is full or crap. These people tend to sign up for every stupid newsletter and updates from every sight they see...because hey it is fun to get email! But quickly they sign up for some much stuff that they have 100 emails every time they log it. It takes mental power to deal with all these and they just don't want to go through and clean up their own mess and unsubscribe from this crap. For them it is just easier to start over.

• They don't understand SPAM filters. They complain that they get all this crap email for Viagra or whatever...but they don't take the 2 minutes to learn how to engage their SPAM filters or mark items SPAM so their filter learns for the future. It is time to start over again! Eventually every email address is going to be harvested by a SPAM bot, learn how to use your filters and tag stuff that is inappropriate.

Seriously, get a web based email address and stop annoying me with your constant switching.

End Hate