Canceling old accounts

I signed up for my Hotmail account in 1998, back when the free Web-based mail ser­vice was rel­a­tively new. The ser­vice had just been pur­chased by Microsoft when I signed up for it, and Microsoft hadn’t yet rebranded Hotmail to make it into MSN Anything or MSN Live Anything-else. It was just Hotmail. It had about a mil­lion users and I basi­cally had my pick of user­names — I even had a four-character pass­word, some­thing that would (and should) never be allowed these days.

I men­tion this because that old account, along with my university-issued address, was my first e-mail account. My very first. Sure, I’ve had many since then, includ­ing accounts at Yahoo, Altavista, Lycos, Gmail and oth­ers (all using the same user­name, by the way), but that ini­tial Hotmail account stands out in my mind, a demar­ca­tion between my life before the Web and every­thing else. It was a big deal.

So why bring this all up now? Because I’m con­sid­er­ing can­cel­ing my Hotmail account, that’s why. Yes, the account that has been with me for a decade, the account that served me so well back when I was on a 24.6 kbps modem con­nec­tion, the account that served me through the e-mail boom (when every­one in my high school got e-mail accounts at the same time and when I was get­ting around 130 for­wards per day in my inbox)... that account, my sem­i­nal account, might just die.

To be fair, it’s dead already. Once crip­pled by spam, the Hotmail account now sits atro­phied by dis­use. Even the spam­mers have basi­cally for­got­ten that it exists, as there has been no traf­fic out of the account in more than two years. Why should I use that old Hotmail thing, after all? I’ve got Gmail now, and Gmail rules supreme. And there’s another thing. Remember that university-issued address? That’s still with me. I use it every day; I install spam fil­ters galore to keep it alive and work­ing. That one’s saveable.

But I am will­ing to let Hotmail die, die for real. Die the final death, the “Close Account” death.

Or am I? There’s a cer­tain amount of sen­ti­men­tal­ity attached to that first account. Plus, there’s the off chance that some other jack­ass might reg­is­ter that account name and sully my avatar’s good rep­u­ta­tion around the Web. And what harm is there in keep­ing it? It’s just elec­trons sit­ting on some­one else’s server, some­where in the world. Why should I delete it?

I’m strad­dling a bor­der here. On one side I have dig­i­tal free­dom, an unclut­tered past. On the other side, I have the begin­nings of a life lived as a dig­i­tal pack rat — the very life that Gmail and these other mega-storage-with-search mail ser­vices encour­ages us to live. Do I want to live that way? Is this more than a sen­ti­men­tal ques­tion? Is this a philo­soph­i­cal ques­tion too?

Related posts:

1. Gmail woes
2. E-mail After Death
3. Web 2.0 Suicide
4. Journalist Bailout Program
5. …a new wind was about to blow