E-mail

I know several people with multiple email identities. And I am one of those people.

Before, during the time of the Internet boom, I am one of those who lined up with hotmail's new web-based email. Hotmail was then a non-Microsoft entity, and it was hot. A 2MB space is more than enough to handle most of your electronic correspondences.

Now, several web-based email services are vying in for the "biggest and i'm the killer email app in the market" title. Google and Yahoo (cn) are both offering 1 GB email addresses.

It's tempting to sign-up with every latest email service that hit the market. Me, I have older hotmail and yahoo addresses. I did sign up for the 1GB yahoo.com.cn email and the 1GB gmail address. And if you are an avid outlook user, you might consider getting a free POP email account via HotPOP.

Now, with all that email identities (I have 6 different email addresses, including one at work), the question is, what to do with all these? Well, I have one email for official correspondences (work), another for internet registration (spam), two for personnal email (yahoo and hotmail), and two others (1GB) for absolutely no purpose. And yet, I am thinking of getting my own domain, with it's own web-based email. Wouldn't it be nice if all these web-based email can be interfaced through a common http protocol using just one email application? Microsoft has started it with hotmail http access through outlook, but it doesn't look like others would follow suit.

It's just too bad for an avid email collector such as myself :P