To My Email Address On Its 18th Birthday—I Hate You

How long have you had your email address? I was wondering the same thing the other day, so I checked my Gmail creation date using Google Takeout—18 years!

This means my Gmail address is old enough to drink (well, in Puerto Rico) and we’ve been together a long time. Except, I hate my email address and I wish I’d chosen something else.

Never Let a 21-Year Old Pick an Email Address

When you’re 21 you’re a grownup, right? Well, when I picked out my Gmail address 18 years ago I certainly thought so, but if I actually had a lick of common sense I would have picked something like “SydneyLButler” or another perfectly sensible address that would literally have been timeless.

Instead. I picked an email address that haunts me every time someone has to read it back to me over the phone.

I Should Have Spent More Than Five Minutes Thinking of One

Maybe I thought that I wouldn’t be using this email address forever? Actually, the truth is I probably wasn’t thinking at all. Up to that point, I’d been using something like Hotmail or Yahoo!. Honestly I can’t even remember, but Gmail seemed like a better deal and I needed a new email address anyway, because the one before that was tied to my forum days in the late 90s and early 2000s—let’s just say that address would have been even worse.

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At Least It’s Not Offensive, but It Is Baffling

The email address is “wallmaniacal” and I can share it because that’s my public professional email address anyway, so you’ll find it anywhere on the web I have a profile or a bio. What the heck does “wallmaniacal” even mean? The answer is nothing.

What happened is that I used to use the handle “Jericho” on forums, so I had a weird train of thought regarding the “walls of Jericho” which somehow became “wallman”.

Except Google informed me that someone had already taken that, and since I didn’t want to be “wallman2568” I just kept adding syllables until the little checkmark turned green: wallman>wallmaniac>wallmaniacal.

That’s it. No special meaning, no particular forethought, and I’d committed to almost two decades of saying “yes, that’s the one” as some poor call center worker tries to confirm my email address.

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Finally.

It’s Way Too Much Hassle to Change

So why don’t I just change it? Sadly, you can’t just change your Gmail address, so the best you can do is set up an entirely new email address, and then forward all your mail from the old one. To me, that feels a bit like putting a hat on a hat, which means I’d have to go to every service or online account I have and change the email—if that’s even allowed.

However, I’ll probably have to do it at some point. After all, just over ten years ago, when I started doing a more public type of job and my email became listed on so many sites, I hadn’t considered that this would even happen. So now my personal email has effectively become my public email address. Though I have all the usual security measures, so I’ve not had any issues related to that, it probably makes more sense to have my own separate email for some types of correspondence.

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Honestly, Too Much of My Life Relies on This Email Address

An email address seems pretty inconsequential in the greater scheme of things, but the truth is that email is still a major part of my life and even yours. Of course, we don’t use email to communicate with other people much.

If someone emails me, it’s because we don’t already know each other, and further conversation is going to happen on a messaging app instead of an email chain. You might use emails for internal communication at work, but these days you’re actually more likely to use Slack or Teams.

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What email is mostly used for is official communication, or to give you access to other services. So while we’re not really using email for personal communication, it’s still the bedrock of much of what we do.

Which is why I have to cringe a little every time I’m forced to use the email address of an impatient 21-year-old who didn’t think the details mattered and just needed an email address for college.