About fifteen months ago I deleted all of my digital life, including the email address I had had since early 2004 (an early gmail address when it was "by invitation only"). To be completely accurate, I didn't delete the old email address, but I did set up an auto-response to let people know I was no longer using it. Much like the laptop I had during the summer of 2015, the email address was polluted and tainted for me. I couldn't bring myself to continue to use it, I was even terrified of opening the account on my new laptop (the cheapest one I could find) so didn't even download my contacts. (My phone went the same way, I deleted everything from it and then replaced it.)
But twelve years of emails is a lot to walk away from, so even though I couldn't open the account I couldn't actually delete the account either. I eventually found out that it is possible to download all one's emails from a gmail account. That did mean logging into the account, which I did on a university computer - my theory, or at least what put my mind to rest, was that the university was bound to have better spyware / malware than I have on my laptop so if there was anything odd on my email the university's systems would neutralize it. Now, I certainly know that if what I was concerned about had happened, it likely wouldn't have mattered where I logged onto the account, so my thinking was just my mind trying to find something that would let me access the account again.
Download it all I did. What did I do with the 40,000 plus emails (oh, and yes, it took some time for the download link to be ready!)? Nothing. At least, nothing for a long time. On my first attempt at opening the emails I discovered it was in an MBOX format. I had no idea what that was. Or how to open it. Which, again, was fine by me. I didn't really want to have to face the old emails as facing them would me thinking about why I had stopped using the account. But I often thought about it, there were emails that occasionally I wanted, people I wanted to contact but whose contact details were in the old email account, photos that I knew were there. Believe me, we keep a lot of our lives on email (or we used to, nowadays its probably on Whatsapp but that seems more ephemeral to me, I don't treat it as something that is permanent as I did emails) so for much of the last 15 months I've had this sense that there's a world I left behind, and not because I wanted to.
So the next step is to transfer the MBOX format into thunderbird or something similar and check the last 15 months of emails. I'm not sure how long it will take me to look at August 2015. Some day perhaps.
Download it all I did. What did I do with the 40,000 plus emails (oh, and yes, it took some time for the download link to be ready!)? Nothing. At least, nothing for a long time. On my first attempt at opening the emails I discovered it was in an MBOX format. I had no idea what that was. Or how to open it. Which, again, was fine by me. I didn't really want to have to face the old emails as facing them would me thinking about why I had stopped using the account. But I often thought about it, there were emails that occasionally I wanted, people I wanted to contact but whose contact details were in the old email account, photos that I knew were there. Believe me, we keep a lot of our lives on email (or we used to, nowadays its probably on Whatsapp but that seems more ephemeral to me, I don't treat it as something that is permanent as I did emails) so for much of the last 15 months I've had this sense that there's a world I left behind, and not because I wanted to.
So the next step is to transfer the MBOX format into thunderbird or something similar and check the last 15 months of emails. I'm not sure how long it will take me to look at August 2015. Some day perhaps.
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