A rich life, a full life, a sadly expired e-life

Four years, gone. Is that the real world looming?

IN TRANSITION #2

By Benjamin Toff, Globe Correspondent | August 7, 2005
Read it on Boston.com

My e-mail inbox was my college home away from home (well, virtual home away from home). Now it's gone.

It expired the other Friday, just as we were getting ready to celebrate its fourth anniversary. During that time, it lived fully, sending 11,831 messages and receiving thousands more. Although no tears were shed, its passing means as much to me as the loss of a dear friend.

OK, that's a stretch, but it is eerily strange waking up in the morning and accessing e-mail elsewhere on the Web. As much as I tell myself it's time to move on, I can't get the image of my former inbox out of my head. The black and green lettering, the electronic thump it used to make when new mail arrived, the way it would reformat text at the stroke of a key.

Talk about attachments -- my e-mail made them the old-fashioned way. You had to be deliberate, know what you wanted, and work at it -- no point, click, and browse there. It took me a year before I knew how to send a photo or document; it taught me humility and self-reliance.

I'm in e-mail mourning.

Over that first weekend without it, in a fit of desperation and depression, I did as any mourner ought; I reflected. I reminisced. It's a necessary part of letting go. I went to my ''sent" mailbox (which I copied over just prior to its demise). It provided an embarrassingly detailed anthology of my last four years. Suddenly, everything flooded back.

Some people save every e-mail they ever receive. Not me. I can't stand the clutter; I send most everything to the trash once I'm through with it. I organize my virtual home more meticulously than my physical one.

Early on I decided to save e-mail that I sent out, assuming something worth replying to is worth saving. (Somewhere before the 11,831 mark, however, that might have been wishful thinking.)

My sent mailbox contains the usual: the awkward introductions, the excuses for sleeping through class, the drunken screeds typed in the middle of the night (''so. owas wrigi noyu a good e-mail that was cool and then my friend shut off the [expletive] computuer.") A partial translation: ''So I was writing you a good e-mail that . . ." You get the picture.

Of course, those messages are then followed by the sober morning after apologies: ''Here I am writing you yet another 'Sorry about the flood of drunken e-mails' e-mail."

I smiled when I came across that first batch of messages. ''Hi. I'm in college now. My e-mail works. I'm exhausted. Talk more later, Ben." I had only the faintest hints of the next four years.

I'm trying to learn to like my new e-mail. It has some good features. My new inbox is searchable by keyword, and the address book links directly to messages to and from each contact.

But there's still the pain of knowing that no matter how much prettier or technologically superior my new e-mail proves to be, it will never possibly replace my old college account.

Nothing ever will.

Benjamin Toff lives in Cambridge. He can be reached at btoff@boston.com.