Communication

Without notification, my email provider last week handed me over to Yahoo. I can hardly complain, since I haven’t paid that company since moving to New York, only because they don’t offer service here. It would have been better to abandon my old address and use my secondary G mail instead. I might have guessed there would be problems down the line, but back in 2018 I had more than enough other issues to sort out with the move.

Then, recently I suddenly had no access to my email and I thought initially that it might be a problem with my aging PC. I struggled for a day, but finally launched a message to my contacts asking them to use G mail instead, whereupon I discovered that my old address was still available, but through Yahoo.

Perhaps I should have stuck to the G mail plan, but there would likely be people who didn’t get my message about the change and it is useful to have a secondary, so: Yahoo.

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The first thing I noticed was that my messages had become very few. I put this down to an absence of spam which I was very happy to be rid of.

Two days ago – a deluge of 1110 messages, most of them not spam. Largely, unimportant notifications or acknowledgments, but not all and of course I had to scan the lot before deleting them. In some cases, action was required, so it was a lengthy process.

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In time I have no doubt I will adjust to Yahoo’s format, but it is an unwelcome change, reminiscent of moving to a new classroom or office and having your stuff in the wrong place.

It set me thinking about life before email which wasn’t really all that long ago.

Even in a social setting I often get tongue-tied. I am not a talker. But I was always good at letter-writing. At boarding school we were required to write home once a week which I did without being encouraged, but many of my classmates sat looking miserably at their writing pad, clueless. So I offered suggestions. Even though I didn’t know their families, I could guess the sort of news they might like to receive.

In those pre-computer days, we had pen-pals in lieu of a blogosphere. The idea of corresponding with young people in different parts of the world had great appeal to me and I wrote away through some teen magazine requesting a contact. I soon received a letter from a young lad in Turkey, but I was in a convent school where all my mail was censored and the nuns forbade me to write back.

Whether it was because my penpal was a boy, or maybe that they were afraid he might be Muslim, I don’t know. They ought to have been more concerned about the local behaviour of some of the other girls in their care, rather than my writing to a boy 2,000 miles away.

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There was plenty I didn’t care for at boarding school that I managed to tolerate, but having my mail censored was offensive to me, most particularly letters to my parents. How was what I wrote to my parents any business of the nuns?

When I first went to the school in Cambodia, I wrote home that all was well but that my bed was a little hard, which was no exaggeration, since it consisted of a thin mattress on a platform. It was not a complaint, merely a statement of fact, but I got into trouble over it.

At that same school, one day as I crossed the yard I noticed a piece of pale blue paper by my foot. It had writing on it which looked familiar, so I picked it up. It was part of a letter from an aunt in England. It had been torn up without ever being delivered to me. Letters from family were important. To find out that they were withheld was beyond disappointing.

To who was I to protest, exactly?

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With the arrival of email, communication became so efficient! At least I naively thought so. What I was forgetting was that communication goes two ways and it depends on the receiving party actually reading what you write.

Whereas a letter sent by mail actually arrives physically in the recipient’s hand, an email message sits in an inbox which may go unattended for hours, days, months – indefinitely.

One drawback to email that I quickly realised was its immediacy. How often had I, in a state of great annoyance, composed a letter of protest, only to rip it up the next morning and written something more controlled? With email, I pounded on the keys and launched “send” before I could think better of what I’d said. It really is better to cool off first.

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It is embarrassing to acknowledge that in some ways I was shockingly naive. I ought to have realised that email would not be private. I was very annoyed to discover that my inter-office messages were intercepted by managers. I should have expected it, but I really thought they had better use for their time.

What truly appalled me was that an email I once sent resulted in someone losing their job. When my father died, I inherited what was left of his estate which I deposited in my bank, consulting a fund manager. One day I was alarmed to discover that the account had suddenly diminished by a sizeable amount, so I immediately emailed the man. It turned out that he had discovered an annuity which he believed would be perfect for me and I suppose he had to purchase it promptly, so he acted without asking.

My email inquiry was intercepted by the man’s manager and he was fired. I felt awful. Still do, though you never know, I may have done him a favour.

Years later, I had a serious falling out with that bank.

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Something I’d learned very quickly at the airport was that tampering with mail is a federal offense. I was told that if I ever noticed a mailbag lying unattended on the ramp, I should not touch it but call the authorities. That is how serious it was.

Safeguarding email is obviously a great deal harder and cybercrime reportedly was costing the world $10.5 trillion annually by last year. I should think it may be more since there appears to be a cyber-criminal under every stone.

Technology is a wonderful thing, but are we so much better off with it?

One application I would dearly like to eliminate : X, previously Twitter

That we would certainly be better off without.

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