(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. 

The Lost Art of Sending an Email

Hi there,

Want to know what I find beautiful? Well formatted emails.

You know what I mean. There's nothing worse than opening an email and seeing a huge slab of text, forcing you to do some heavy lifting to find out exactly what the sender is trying to say. 

Conversely, the best emails start with a nice little greeting, then a bit of an introductory sentence, followed by a couple of meatier lines or paragraphs. Yet the way these emails are written, you don't have to work hard to find meaning. Your eye is guided through nicely. 

They even look good from a distance, possessing a nice symmetry as they go from short to long to short again. I'd hope that if people saw my emails from afar they'd be able to tell that I was a good emailer without reading the actual words.

There might be a little one line joke or something to finish off the email and reward the recipient for reading.

All that's left is the sign off,

and it's done.

H4CK3D

This morning I awoke to a true 21st century nightmare—my email account security had been ‘compromised’ (you can thank the military for that euphemism) and my good e-name had been soiled in order to sell some sort of working-from-home scam. Slightly shaken, I duly changed my passwords and performed a virus scan on my computer, which made me feel like a character in a Tom Cruise technothriller.

Just as late 19th century Britons had a vague sense of unease over what seemed to them an inevitable invasion from Germany, so too do I have an underlying anxiety of the consequences if my online world were to be breached. Unfortunately the British unease resulted in wonderful literature like H.G Wells’ War of the Worlds; the best you’ll get from me is a blog post in 12pt Verdana.

I actually don’t particularly like using the word ‘hack’ in this case, as it seems too violent for what happened. As far as I can tell no bank or other sensitive details were obtained. For me, true ‘hacking’ is when somebody changes all your passwords so you can’t login (bad), drains your bank account (worse) and likes and comments on hundreds of Facebook photos of people you barely know (tragic). But I can't really think (or be bothered to think) of such an efficient way of describing what happened and so you can safely assume that every appearance of ‘hack’ within this post—including the title—was forced upon me against my will by the Laziness Fairy that lives on my shoulder. 

Although I escaped with relatively little ‘real’ damage, the spam was rather embarrassingly sent out to my parents, close friends, bosses and real estate agent. It would therefore appear the hacking program had some sort of algorithm that selected frequently used email addresses; but it also obscurely chose people I’ve either emailed once or have not spoken to in years. So apologies to the membership department at the Melbourne Football Club, and also to Victorian Legislative Council member Greg Barber (I can’t even remember what I emailed him about—something filled with pent-up second year university rage, no doubt).

In any case, the level of embarrassment was about the same as walking around for half a day with spinach stuck between your teeth. Some people obviously notice and don’t say anything, yet others are kind enough to quietly pull you aside and hand you a toothpick. Certainly not mortifying, but it’s not really the kind of attention you want to draw to yourself. Thankfully for all concerned the spam was an offer to increase your income and not your genitalia.

Although the only thing that was truly hurt was my ego, there is still a sense of unease about being hacked. It’s forced me to re-evaluate all the information I have floating around out there, and come to terms with the idea that anybody determined enough could probably get to it. One of the main issues we now deal with is our complacency with the online security. This is especially true for members of my generation, who grew up alongside the development of the internet, and quite often made choices as teenagers about email and social networking accounts that still affect our adult lives. Even as adults, do many of us take our security all that seriously? I would guess not. I know many people who use the same password across multiple accounts, including the same password for their social media as for their banking.

The reality is that for a few days (weeks if I’m lucky) I’ll have a heightened sense of my online security, and be more careful about where and when I access personal information. I’m careful to a certain extent anyway, but I do worry that before long I’ll slip back into complacency and possibly leave myself open for somebody to do some real damage. As with any break in—online or otherwise—the worst feeling is that somebody I don’t know went through my stuff. I can’t decide whether the fact that in this case it was probably a computer makes that notion more terrifying or not. Alongside my general anxiety of my personal information being compromised, I am resigned to the fact that humanity is destined to meet its ultimate fate at the hands of machines. I’m self-important enough to be worried that hacking my Hotmail account is Phase One of their sinister plan.

the Goody Bag™ Vol. I

Sometimes I have musings which aren’t complete enough to justify a full post, but are interesting enough to stay swimming around in my brain. So prepare to open some new tabs and waste some bandwidth as I bring you the first instalment of the Goody Bag™.

What’s in a name?

‘The Digital Printing Press’ is a nod to the power of the internet as a social institution, much like Gutenberg’s venerable machine before it. Just like the printing press, the internet has heralded a new age of information dissemination, and will be regarded as a high point in human history and innovation for centuries to come.

Looking to end it all?

Of course, this being a blog on all things virtual, I’m talking about online suicide. That’s right; a Dutch based web-service will now delete any existence of you ever being on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace et. Al. This is a scary thought. How much time has been devoted on our social accounts over the years? For some this would be akin to removing a part of their very being.

To me it’s interesting because I think some people are genuinely scared of how much time they spend online. They fear that they are losing connection with the ‘real’ world, becoming consumed with keeping up online appearances. But despite their fear, they cannot break away from it. It still consumes them. The Dutch company has identified this market and realised that the easiest way to break the hypnotic gaze of social networking is to push it off a cliff. I dislike the title suicide machine and I dislike the imagery associated with it. It’s certainly a dark topic, but despite the macabre connotations of the name and the site imagery (their icon is a noose), the creators promote the site as a healthy, life giving service. 

Email Etiquette

One of the stupidest things that I have seen on the internet is unsubscribing from an email newsletter only to have the company/promoter send you a ‘confirmation of successful un-subscription’ email. Surely this last email is actually loaded with spyware and because you have now opted out of the Terms and Conditions of their mailing list the company/promoter can now legally use this final email to download spyware onto your computer and swipe your perosnal information. Sorry about that last typo, I was re-adjusting my tinfoil hat.

In a similar vein, is it bad email policy to write one word responses like ‘Yes; Thanks; Okay; Excellent’ etc? With trillions of emails floating around on the net, it seems incredibly stupid to continue to clog it up with even more inane garbage. But failure to acknowledge someone’s email might mean they think you haven’t got it, so then they send it again, and then you’ll be obliged to send your acknowledgment email anyway and the actual email tally is now +1 on what it should have been. This is the kind of stuff that keeps me awake at night.

Book depository tracker

In case you don’t waste enough time on the Internet already, here’s a great site that tracks what books are being sold online around the world. The web app gives a nice visual representation of online bookseller The Book Depository’s global market: purchases in Europe, North America and Oceana are common but rarely is a purchase made in South America, Africa or Northern Asia. A highlight for me included someone in the UK somewhat poignantly buying 1984. Despite its Big Brother undertones, the website is helpful because if nothing else it helps to show that your life is infinitely more exciting than the poor sod from Malta who forked out 40 bucks for ‘Wind Energy Explained’.

That’s all for now. If you enjoyed this post, why not gently spam your friends by reposting on Facebook?