Another sentimental loss

The other day I de-activated my second oldest email account. It was my first Yahoo account, which actually was my very first webmail account. I've had it for 12 years, creating it when I did a stint in Munich as accessing my lab account (which remains my oldest existing account) that I used exclusively would have been very inconvenient. Webmail was sort of new at the time but the ability to access email from any browser anywhere made it compelling.

Well, back in its early days I was a little more promiscuous with its use (spam hadn't yet reached its peak). And it being that old, it made its way onto a LOT of spam lists. Eventually it was 99.99% spam, I could NOT find legit email on it easily. In fact, I learned some heartbreaking news of emails I missed for that very reason. It just got to the point where it was unusable due to the spam problem, and the Yahoo spam filter was loosing. I don't know why I kept it well past when I stopped using it. I simply don't. I even payed for the PoP access for years. Maybe because I had stuff attached to it, but that made no sense because I would never know. But now it's gone. Yet another part of the purge. It's just a bloody email account but for some reason I felt a little bit of loss. Now to get rid of the oldest account which is also nearly unusable... though I can see some small point in keeping it. I did try to get rid of it, but the sysadmin never removed it.

Contact merger

I don't know when it happened but at long last, there finally exists a means of simply merging the many different contact listings for the same person (as people rotate email addresses and whatnot). It's a killer feature that I've always desired but have never seen in any contact manager I've used. I've posted to group boards on this topic before. This problem came to the forefront when using webmail accounts like Yahoo and Google that typically added contacts based on incoming or outgoing emails. Hence multiple contacts for the same person were created. Finally Google's contact manager has a way of merging the many versions into a single contact. The lack of that feature (and the fact that there were just so many contacts, most of which I don't need to have synced) caused me to manually create a small set of contacts using a different application. I now have some incentive to keep clean up my contact list in Google and perhaps even use their new Google Sync.