Personally, I've only been using it for the last 27 years. Well, ok, that's a lie. I've been using it for the last 16 years... but I had an email address 27 years ago. It was right there, on the babysitter... Dad, working out at the college, found that for a buck an hour he could have his son play Colossal Caves on the old PDP. Now that was a deal.

I still remember my first ride out to the campus computer, dictionary in hand. Why the dictionary? I was told that I was going to be given a new account, and there would be nothing there... so I thought I'd have to teach the computer. Oh yes, I was young. Seven, I think.

In any case... email... that was the topic. I remember seeing my mailbox on this strange new machine. It was the first thing that the admin pointed out to my father and I. My little listing of messages, the "welcome to the machine" greeting and all the machine wide spam sent out by the admins. Starting a trend I still follow to this day, I deleted it all. Well, I probably ignored it and went straight to the games directory (the nice admin pointed them out to me next... what a swell guy).

It's now 27 years later and damn if email isn't all pervasive.

I can't quite imagine what high school would have been like with email. Given the amount of time we spent on the phone that would be nothing compared to the drive space we would have devoted to email.

I'm certain that my friends and I would have started using encryption - just on general principals... well, probably more specific principals. Can you imagine a teenager who would not encrypt their phone calls? Diaries? Private conversations? It's not just that you want privacy, it's there's so much you wouldn't even want to spend the time explaining to your folks, even if it is benign.

But I'll leave the length and breadth of teenage email usage for the teenagers of today to describe years from now.

It's time now for me to be the curmudgeon that I am.

Clean up your responses, people!

God Damn.

If I'm having a discourse with you, there is no need for you to repeat my entire letter back to me. Granted, you might want to maintain some sort of context... Well fine, then do so, and use my previous letter as a map for your discussion. Keep only (only god damn it) the lines that matter. After each quote of mine, reply to it, and then go on to the next trimmed quote of mine. Don't bother quoting the things you agree with, don't bother quoting my signature, don't quote the email header. I wrote the original email, I damn well don't want to see it thrown back at me. Spend some time culling that puppy down to a readable response if you want me to spend any time looking over it.

And whoo-boy! There's a special section of hell devoted to those copy my entire message and then respond after my text. Yes... it's only a mouse click or a space bar "tap" down the page, but don't make me scroll... you're only asking for me to hurt you in some bizarre ASCII vengeance scheme.

And let me say a word or two about spam... Is there anyone who's responding to your spam, you spammers? You meatless, gyrating, overconfident, seersucker wearing simpletons? It's not like there's a variation of spam I haven't seen under the sun. It's gotten to the point where the nerves in my fingers recognize spam faster than my brain does... the d key is hit that quickly. Honestly. I hear the tap and think "oh, it must have been spam, because it's gone now... good finger."

If you spammers are going to get our attention, you're going to have to do something creative. You're smarmy enough, why not introduce viruses that specially go after mail server programs? You could arrange to have them ransom our regular mail back to us: All last Thursday's mail, returned unharmed and unread, if you visit our site. How do you people sleep at night? What do you tell others you do as your day job?

Anyways, enough ranting.

Besides, I'm depressed now.

I can't remember the last time I wrote somebody a real letter. Have you seen my handwriting? It used to be beautiful and precise. Now it's creative. Pah.