Partial Recovery.
I found most of the missing emails. It seems to be some sort of glitch with AOL 9.1; I remembered I had an old AOL 9.0 disk, reinstalled it, and everything worked as expected.
However, somehow what got saved was an old version from the last time my computer died. That means all of my emails from January through last week are still gone, which is still a great loss.
So now here's my dilemma:
I kept AOL for all of these years because all of those emails were stored there. Yesterday, thinking they were gone forever, I set up a gmail account and sent a "goodbye, cruel AOL" email to pretty much everyone I'd ever met. Now that I've recovered (most of) those emails, I'm not sure what to do.
Pros and cons:
* I like my AOL screen name much better than I like my gmail screen name. "Hopita" has been my online identity since ... well, since I've been online. Had hopita@gmail.com (or h0pita@gmail.com, or h0p1ta@gmail.com, or any similar derivative thereof) been available, I would have snatched it up no worries. "Hopalessence" is nice (it's a Dan nickname -- he calls me "hopalescent one" sometimes), but it's long, and it has a lot of potential for spelling errors ("hopalessence"? "hopalescence"? "hopalessense"?) and the like.
* With gmail, I don't risk having this happen again. AOL apparently has some sort of "premium" thing where you can make sure that this shit won't happen, but I'd have to pay more for it.
* Oh yea, the money. gmail free. AOL not so free. And to make sure that I don't lose everything again, they're gonna ask me to bend over. And that's money that could be going toward the data plan for the iPhone I so desperately wanted.
So there's my dilemma. Bare minimum, gmail will be pulling copies of all of my AOL emails for 30 days, so I at least have some time to decide while I'm covered in both places.
Thoughts?
However, somehow what got saved was an old version from the last time my computer died. That means all of my emails from January through last week are still gone, which is still a great loss.
So now here's my dilemma:
I kept AOL for all of these years because all of those emails were stored there. Yesterday, thinking they were gone forever, I set up a gmail account and sent a "goodbye, cruel AOL" email to pretty much everyone I'd ever met. Now that I've recovered (most of) those emails, I'm not sure what to do.
Pros and cons:
* I like my AOL screen name much better than I like my gmail screen name. "Hopita" has been my online identity since ... well, since I've been online. Had hopita@gmail.com (or h0pita@gmail.com, or h0p1ta@gmail.com, or any similar derivative thereof) been available, I would have snatched it up no worries. "Hopalessence" is nice (it's a Dan nickname -- he calls me "hopalescent one" sometimes), but it's long, and it has a lot of potential for spelling errors ("hopalessence"? "hopalescence"? "hopalessense"?) and the like.
* With gmail, I don't risk having this happen again. AOL apparently has some sort of "premium" thing where you can make sure that this shit won't happen, but I'd have to pay more for it.
* Oh yea, the money. gmail free. AOL not so free. And to make sure that I don't lose everything again, they're gonna ask me to bend over. And that's money that could be going toward the data plan for the iPhone I so desperately wanted.
So there's my dilemma. Bare minimum, gmail will be pulling copies of all of my AOL emails for 30 days, so I at least have some time to decide while I'm covered in both places.
Thoughts?