Me and My Yahoo! Mail

Thank you to Yahoo! Mail for sponsoring this post about staying connected. I was selected for this sponsorship by the Clever Girls Collective, which endorses Blog With Integrity, as I do.

When I logged into my first Yahoo! Mail inbox (which I still use for overflow e-mail), I went back to the very beginning and spent much more time than I had planned to spend, just walking down memory lane.

I was at my first job at the time, anchoring the morning news in Columbia, South Carolina. My e-mails were mainly to family and high school and college friends. We kept each other up-to-date via e-mail and for me in particular, it was a social lifeline. Getting up at 2am and going to bed at 7pm each night didn't leave much room for real-life conversations. I remember working diligently on my newscasts each morning so that I would have a few minutes before the show at 6am to read over the e-mails my friends had written to me the night before. My responses were sent at 4:30am. 5 am. 5:45 am. Yeah, being a news anchor was fun, but I'm so glad that bizarre schedule is a merely a distant memory now!

A few years passed and my personal e-mails became less frequent. I had moved to Nashville, broken up with a longtime boyfriend, and met someone new-- These kinds of life changes were hard to explain to long distance friends. I did send out an e-mail to everyone when I got engaged, though. The flurry of responses I received still crack me up.

"You're doing what?"

"What happened to your ex-boyfriend?"

"Who's that? I thought you were dating _______!"

Next came a series of e-mails to and from various locations in Scotland, where I married. I planned my entire wedding by e-mail-- I tried calling a few places, but the Scottish accent proved to be a little too much for me over the phone, particularly when I was dealing with important wedding details. Better to put it in writing. Thanks to my inbox, I now have a detailed record of all my wedding plans. It's fun to look back at all that went into that event- And thanks to Yahoo! Mail, it went off without a hitch. In fact, my wedding was far more extraordinary than I ever had imagined it could be.

Once I married, I opened a joint Yahoo! Mail account with my husband and the personal e-mails on my single girl account petered out. I'm so thankful, though, that Yahoo! Mail moved to unlimited storage several years ago, because now my inbox functions as a sort of archive- a fascinating personal history comprising all the details of my life, both mundane and life-changing.

I never realized when I opened that free Yahoo! Mail account all those years ago just how much it would mean to me now.