(at)hotmail.com

Lately I’ve become increasingly self-conscious of my email address, in much the same way that I’m sure people who wear tan shoes with white socks sometimes question their choice before convincing themselves that they look great.

Of course, when I first got my Hotmail address, there really wasn’t much of an alternative—Gmail wasn’t available and, more importantly, a Hotmail address was a prerequisite to use MSN messenger, which was the real reason I signed up for one in the first place. I’m not sure I used Hotmail to actually send an email for quite some time. 

Thankfully, my current primary Hotmail address is respectable in the sense that it’s my name with an underscore, as compared to my first ever Hotmail address which was black_betty42@hotmail.com. This was due to my thirteen-year old self’s love of cheesy pseudo-metal rock music and, I hasten to point out, was selected before Spiderbait came out with their radio-friendly cover and destroyed what little underground credibility the address had. Such is the tragicomedy that is my online life.

The black_betty address is now my version of a dodgy industrial waste disposal site, in which I direct any and all junk and assume that by the time somebody has to deal with the consequences I’ll be long dead. I’m not sure how legally binding blog posts are (this may set a precedent) but I hereby leave my black_betty42@hotmail.com to my next of kin. The password is tattooed in my left armpit.

Part of the reason I like my current Hotmail address is that it’s a small fuck you to the overarching dominance of Google. Sometimes I wake from a nightmare in which Google has somehow programmed all the people with Gmail accounts into a zombie army intent on taking over the world and building a giant Death Star-esque satellite in the colour and shape of the Chrome logo. The only people left to resist the G-zombies are Hotmail users and we end up saving the world and are rewarded by Bill Gates with extra powerful spam filters for our accounts.

The @hotmail thing is getting a bit embarrassing though. The ‘hot’ part alone probably automatically puts any email I send in most people’s spam folders. It just doesn’t look quite as professional as @gmail and smacks of the early-2000s when email was still a bit of a novelty and not used as much for actual serious things like job applications and banking. I thought when Hotmail.com recently became Outlook.com (because obviously Microsoft were embarrassed too) that I would get a much more palatable @outlook address, but Microsoft were very generous and, in order to allow a ‘seamless upgrade’, let me keep my Hotmail address. Bastards.

But I’m averse to switching to a Gmail account, partly because of the aforementioned apocalyptic scenario but mainly because, like most people, I’m lazy and scared of change. Yes, I know that there are relatively easy ways to set up email forwarding so that I won’t really even notice the difference, but the truth is, despite it being sometimes embarrassing, I’ve grown quite fond of my Hotmail address. We’ve been through some good times together, and apart from the one time it allowed itself to be compromised by a mystery hacker, it has never let me down. 

Besides, I’m kind of hoping one day that I’ll be the last person on earth with a working Hotmail address, and perhaps I’ll become some sort of anthropological touchstone, like those people who are the last to speak a certain language, and when they die are mourned because they take with them a small but significant piece of human history.