E-mail consolidation

The internet access here at the University of Sussex is really frustrating. It’s one of those things where there are about four spots on campus where you can get online, and the wireless bubbles that surround them extend approximately four feet from the rooms with public computers. It’s as if they’ve hidden the wireless routers in the basement locket in a metal cage.

As a result, most of the time I’m too lazy to unplug my laptop and carry it across campus to the nearest hotspot, and I’ll end up plunking away on old computers with tabless internet exporer and none of my cookies.

To make me even happier, the network here is somehow configured to block Outlook. It also blocks the mozilla client, and quite probably, Eudora. In fact, I think the only thing it doesn’t block is “Mulberry,” the e-mail client that the University has repeatedly tried to sell me.

This is frustrating because although most of my e-mail addresses have web interfaces, I use Outlook to dump them all into one inbox, so I don’t have to go crawling around six million different sites and navigate 100 different interfaces just to check and respond to my e-mail.

It wasn’t until I tried to log into my FlickR account that I realized how many e-mail addresses this is. I got it right on the sixth try, and I had another couple I was waiting to try.

Everyone has (or should have) at least two e-mails. One for e-mail, one for spam. I’ve got a yahoo account that recieves over 150 e-mails daily, basically none of which are legitimate. But I know a bunch of people also get stuck with old e-mail addresses they don’t want. I’ve had one e-mail address for eight years now, and I still use it. It’s because you’ve subscribed to services, or people from ages ago have your e-mail address---or, and I know someone this applies to, so *many* people have your e-mail address that trying to change it is a bit of a ridiculous notion.

I’m not sure what the solution to this is. But there should be one.

I’ll think about it.