Uncorking old emails

While putting the Christmas ornaments under the eaves, I stumbled upon some CDs of 10+ year old college email. My attic gets wicked hot in the summer and cold as ice in the winter, so I popped the CDs into my laptop just to see if they were actually readable.

Amazingly, they were. Amazingly for a CS graduate, I moronically left my email in a number of formats:

1. Some binary that might be an encrypted WordPerfect file from 1995. Or it could be the format DOS uses when you copy things spanned across multiple floppies. I can't quite tell yet, but I think I'm going to have to write some code to figure it out.
2. Pegasus Mail, circa 1996
3. Eudora from 1997
4. Outlook in 1998--good luck parsing a .pst file
5. Scattered clean text files from Pine

So what's a fella to do? Install VMWare or Parallels, find an old Windows 95 key and some more backup CDs with ancient versions of the relevant software, and hope to God that I can extract all the proprietary formats into a simple text format so I can just "more" the files while I knock back some cold ones.

I worked very hard during college, but you wouldn't know it from my email trail. It appears I just sat around whining very, very verbosely about women. Even accounting for typing about 90 wpm, the sheer volume of email I produced and read makes me think I misspent my college life writing and reading email at a time when people thought you were a complete loser if you used ntalk or ytalk. Fast forward 10 years and now you're a loser if you don't use IM in one form or another. Huh? We were definitely ahead of our time.

A weird thing happened to me while reading what should have been safely defused emails from distance of 10 years: I got pretty stressed out. I had some unhealthy relationships (physically and email-wise) with this one girl in particular and after reading a few of our exchanges, I started sweating as if the conversation was happening right now. The only thing I had to anchor me in the here-and-now 10 years later was the fact that I was reading the email in a slightly different font on a Mac and not on a DOS terminal plugged into Pine. But I was reading it in Terminal.app, which tells you something about the staying power of the command line.

So to all you young'uns out there with your fancy communication tools: extract and save everything in ASCII. And wait 20 years before re-opening the emotional mine field that is your college email.

That last bit of advice might not apply to anyone except folks in college between, say, 1992 and 2001. First discovering email during college is sort of like first discovering your genitals at the age of 19. All of a sudden there's this incredible tool at your disposal, you have no idea what the rules surrounding it are, it's the source of pleasure, fun, regret, fun, pleasure, shame, regret, pleasure, and by the way, you're drunk and high often while you figure out how to use it, and no one else knows or has any experience with it, so you all stumble around equally ignorant, diddling anything that moves. Eventually people start catching the clap and figuring out what the boundaries of email are.

Hence the outrageous amount of oversharing in both my inbound and outbound college emails. Back in the mid nineties, there wasn't a trivial way to share things online. Heck, some email programs didn't even have a GUI, much less a "forward" feature or BCC. The boundaries around email were very similar to those around mail: mail was private, so email should be private. Because of this assumption, people tended to be much more revealing on email, at least in my experience. There's a lot of self-incriminating stuff in my college email. I doubt college kids these days make the same blunders because the assumption these days is that anything in a computer is inherently unsafe, and if you email a picture of your hoo-ha to someone, that shit is going to be all over the interwebs in no time.

Kids these days learn the same lessons I learned about email, IM, and texting/sexting, but instead of learning them while getting stoned at the age of 20, they figured them out while drinking apple juice in preschool. I think that qualifies as "progress".