It may be silly, looking back fondly on the days when I had to remember an eddress like “friend69%node.bitnet@tardis.univ.edu” or worse in order to send someone an email at a speed that was measured by baudrate ... and via a modem that one had to place the phone receiver on ... but in some ways I do. If I mistyped the eddress, or the server was down, or there was a problem of any kind in sending or receiving the email, I got a big ol’ BOUNCE message in return. If I didn’t get one, I knew my email had gone through.

These days, I send out email and wonder ... will it get wrongly trapped in a spam filter? Will it not get through because of blacklisting, because my domain has been forged in spamming? Or because I specifically am not on the recipient’s whitelist? Or do the various factions of the internet necessary to get the packets from point A to point B not speak to each other often or reliably any more? Or did the recipient receive my email, but is too busy/behind and has let it languish, forgotten? Or does the recipient just not want to talk to me?

Granted, not all of those questions would be answered under the old system ... but a lot of the guesswork and frustration wouldn’t exist.

What can I say? I am a confirmed internet dinosaur. Lynx and Pine and Archie and Gopher have different primary connotations for me than they do for most people ... Meantime, I’m tired of not knowing whether my email is getting through or not.