Old Dogs and New Email

It has been 12 days since my last post.

In more than seven years of keeping this blog, the only times I failed to keep it up have been when (a) I've been ailing, (b) had limited Internet access (as when on vacation) or (c) been dealing with an all-consuming home improvement project.

I cannot claim any of those excuses right now (although my husband did decide to re-do the drywall he put up in the living room, which I guess qualifies as a half-consuming home improvement project).

But the biggest factor this spring has been something I've mentioned before: The staggering amount of email I now receive on a daily basis. I'm struggling with managing it in a more efficient manner, and so far, I give myself a #FAIL. 

My new iPad hasn't really helped. 

On the one hand, responding to emails on the iPad is way easier than it was on my Blackberry.

On the other hand, the iPad does not play nicely with Roadrunner, and the only way to pull in ALL my email is to connect everything to my long dormant Gmail account... and keeping it all in sync is making me want to pull my hair.

"You're not good with technology," my daughter tells me.

This gets a big laugh from most of my friends, who know I've been pretty much tethered to the Internet for the last dozen years.

And it's even worse than they think: I've been sending and receiving email, posting to message boards and hanging out in chatrooms since 1981 -- which means I was hanging out online when many of my friends were children.

I've always thought of myself as pretty adept when it comes to computers, software and online activities. But I've recently come to the conclusion that experience does not necessarily equal technical proficiency, especially when it comes to new products and practices.

It comes down to the old adage about old dogs and new tricks. And I'm downright ancient, in both dog and computer years.

It's not that I don't keep up on innovative new technologies. I have a pretty savvy network of techie friends. I hear about new companies and products all the time. I check out as many of them as I can.

But I have a problem seeing the utility of new products when what I'm already using is working fine.

Which brings us to Google's Gmail.

As I stated before, I have been using email now for 30 years, first through services like CompuServe and The Source; text-based forerunners of America Online (which did not impress me at all when it made its splashy debut in 1990). 

In the early 90's, I was working outside the home for a trade association, which had selected Microsoft Outlook as its integrated program for email and calendaring. It worked well with the dial-up ISP I subscribed to at home, so I picked up a copy for myself. 

I've been using it ever since. Sure, I checked out free online services like Hotmail -- but they were slow and inefficient and didn't work as well as POP email and Outlook (by the mid-9o's, I was using personal email from my cable company ISP, as well as business accounts I'd set up myself through my own domains, and Outlook was able to pull them all in to one inbox).

Gmail was an improvement over Hotmail - but I didn't see enough benefit there to switch from something that was already working well for me.

However, my friends -- most of whom were brand new Internet users -- didn't have any such preconceptions. They all flocked to Google's mail platform until it became a kind of norm. 

While they were mastering Gmail, I was happily doing what I've always done with Outlook.

I had a Gmail account - but only because it was a requirement before I could use Google's other services, like Docs and Groups. I rarely used it for anything else.

Fast forward to 2011: I am now doing most of my computing on a light little netbook... it works fine for most web-based activities and simple word processing -- but it doesn't have enough RAM to do anything  more complex (i.e., photo and video editing). So I find myself moving between the netbook, my old notebook and my husband's desktop computer.

And two weeks ago, I took possession of my new iPad.

Finally, web based Gmail is making a lot of sense to me, allowing me to send and receive messages across all the devices I'm now using. But managing it isn't. 

At the moment, I've got an issue with emails I think I've trashed on the iPad showing up again when I fire up Outlook (which is, as far as I can tell, the calendar program that best syncs with both my Blackberry and iPad). 

And I've been looking all over for a way to import the hundreds of Outlook archive files into Gmail so I can easily refer back to them. I suspect there's a way to do it - but so far, I've not made it work... so I find myself in situations where I cannot answer an email immediately because I don't have access to previous information. (I realize that once I've switched 100% to Gmail that will be less of an issue, since Gmail conserves everything as "conversations." But that, too, is a difference that I need to get used to, after 20 years of keeping track the old way.)

I realize it's probably just a matter of going into Gmail setup and selecting different options than the ones I've got now. But for me, that involves a lot of trial and error. And a few new tricks.

 

Comments

[Christina Simon]

I'm not a techie! Every time I master something new on the blog or computer, some techie outsmarts him/herself and creates something new for me (and you) to learn!!

Funny piece, I can relate to it.