Daniella's Misadventures

Email Conundrum

I have two email addresses. One at work--ostensibly for work. And one on yahoo for personal stuff. Well, my employer, in its omnipotence, blocks access to personal email at work, so I end up occasionally using my work email for non-work related correspondence. For example, all my communications with my professors are via my work email because I take classes in the evenings. If the professor sends out an email to tell us class is cancelled that night or that you have to read such and such article for that night's lecture (which does happen), and it comes to my yahoo account, well--I will be sitting in class by my lonesome wondering where the hell everyone is, or just look unprepared for lecture and discussion. And, sometimes, I send emails to John regarding personal matters (of life or death, only, I swear!) because he's not always at his desk when I call him and he never, ever checks his voicemail. But I never forward jokes or send emails to my friends because that would be wrong and against my employer's email policy. That's right. It would be wrong. So. I. Never. Do. It. Ever. Got it?

Additionally, my yahoo email is one of the free ones that only offers 15 mb of storage space. So, you email me a picture of you and your new boyfriend (eww, what were you thinking wearing THAT shirt??), my email inbox is now full. So, that email telling me how to enlarge my penis is going to bounce back to the sender (darn!). Plus, I get six tons of spam a day. Really, I DO want to help Mr. Awahabenbe bring his $20 million dollars over from Nigeria, but I'm sick of getting ten emails a day from him!

So, because I have an account with blogger, they offered me a chance to be one of the beta testers of the new Google email system, gmail. Wow, 1000 mb of storage space for free. I don't ever have to delete that email I got from you with that "all women are special, please forward this email to 100 special women you know." I can keep it forever! Yay!

What's the problem, you ask? Well, a lot of people have been up in arms about how Google will be scanning your emails (both incoming and outgoing) to harvest "key words" and then putting targeted banner ads on your emails. Well, big, f875ing deal. They already do this on Blogspot blogs, and they're pretty innocuous. Plus, when I have something private or personal to say -- I call my friends. Remember that quaint old gadget, the telephone? So, really most of my emails fall into two categories -- "hey, whatchya doing, wanna do this that or the other next weekend?" and "ooh, this is funny." I have nothing to hide from Google's search bots. So, my problem? We have an old version of OS on our ibook laptop (the first person who tells me to upgrade gets a raspberry--I'm not familiar enough with Macs to upgrade this thing by myself and I will have gray hair if I wait for John to get around to doing it). Gmail doesn't work on it. So, I can only access it at work and who knows how much longer until my employer, in its omnipotence and magnificence (I love my job! My employer RAWKS!), notices gmail and gives me the "Access Denied" screen?

Anyway, I now have three emails, and I don't know what to do. Any ideas?