You know how sometimes you randomly remember something embarrassing from a hundred years ago and then proceed overthink about it for at least 24 hours, which is absurd because it's in the freaking past? That is definitely what will happen to me if I start looking at my email archives. Of course, now I'm curious though! I was so optimistically ambitious in my 20's, I kind of want to read the pitches I blindly sent.
Great idea! If people are at a loss for which emails to send, or where even to begin looking, they might take inspiration from an art project Miranda July did via newsletter back in 2013. Over 20 weeks, she sent 20 issues featuring emails from the Sent Mail folders of people like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Lena Dunham, Kirsten Dunst, and six of her other friends in various fields. It was a collaborative art project newsletter called We Think Alone.
Each weekly collection of sent emails followed a single theme in this order:
An Email About Money
An Email That Gives Advice
An Email That Mentions Barack Obama
A Business Email
An Email That Includes A Picture of Something You Want
An Email To Your Mom
An Email That Includes A Dream You Had
An Email That Includes A Picture of Art
An Email Where You Describe What You’re Working On
An Email You Decided Not To Send
An Email That Includes A Picture of Yourself
An Email With I Love You In It
An Email With A Link In It
An Email About Being Sad
An Email About A Fear
An Angry Email
An Email That Includes A Song
An Email That’s An Apology
An Email About The Body
An Email About A Problem You’re Having With Your Computer
I wrote about my inbox last year! "The subject lines merged into their own stories as I clicked, scrolled, dragged, and dropped my way through my own personal history."
This is a great antidote for my nostalgia. In addition to being a jerk, my emails remind me that I was also highly insecure and self-absorbed in my early twenties. Grateful to be turning 40 and leaving that shit (mostly) behind.
hey so this prompted me to check my oldest emails (also from 2006!) and i am now crying reading my teenage emails to my grandma. (unironically) thank you! x
Ahh gosh I know the feeling. I found a ton of emails from my late uncle, who was like a grandfather to me -- I had completely forgotten we emailed so much, and that his email style was so off-the-wall/goofy. Hope they're all good memories. <3
I've been raiding my old email accounts for some while now and there are some others than are long dormant and I have no way of reclaiming. There is an email account from the late 90s-early 00s that I wish I could dig up since that was a very personally turbulent period of my life.
Phone texts might be an extension of this but since I didn't start using a smart phone until April 22, most are pretty recent.
Just FYI, I tried forwarding the email to you rather than the form and it was returned by Gmail saying "address not found". Because of course I had to add a commentary ;-)
it's funny that this came across my radar - earlier this week i was excavating my old emails for the first time ever and it was so painful. i had the reckoning, like you did, finding that my words didn't match with the memories of myself. there's a friendship breakup i went through in 2012 and i had such strong memories of the way she wasn't there for me, but i didn't realise my words were also callous and careless too. it wasn't the one-sided breakup i remembered. it's awful going through my emails and at the same time cathartic to release my past selves. we're not meant to keep our words forever, i think?
And so glad I didn't delete emails over the years, especially the first ones between now husband and I, and the ones from right after I got fired and started my own business (now 20 years old. Thanks Ex-Boss for the best thing to ever happen to me!).
Submitted my hubs and I's 2009 exchange --
a) me thanking him (via a mass group email) for coming to my "meet new people in non horrible ways" event,
b) him sending me a thanks for "doing what I do," and
c) me suggesting we "grab BBQ" sometime (we had talked about our love of spreadsheets + BBQ at the event).
The rest, as they say, is history. 😍
Thanks for noodling on this topic, was fun to relive so many pivotal had no idea they were pivotal moments.
Your project to collect long-lost emails for an artsy compilation sounds fascinating! What inspired you to explore email as a form of intimate storytelling, and how do you think these digital artifacts differ from other memory-keeping mediums like photos or journals?
UGH nothing like uncovering several thousands of emails your awful high school boyfriend sent when you'd both been grounded and had your phones taken away but no one thought to ban you from gmail LOL. Mortifying.
Haha it's a hard look down the past, thank you for this. A quick 10min search yielded old cringey emails with my long distance American boyfriend from 2012 and the last break up email - which i didnt search for - from another boy I loved desesperatly in 2016 telling me he'll never speak or see me again which he still does almost 10 years later, and I was touched to rediscover the way he wrote to me.
It's a catalogue of my study years, from uni application to essays sent to professors... I lived in Japan and it also contains exchanges with students I taught whose names i had forgotten ...
I'll save them for one day I'm feeling inquisitory or nostalgic... in some ways it's even more raw and soul revealing than my paper journals...
account I used from 2003-2010 and man, the memories hit me like a truck! So, I totally get your post. Like you, I spent several days just going down the list, reading thru it all. Some I tossed, some I shared, some I archived, and a few I printed out. I laughed and cried but also struggled to put several into context - what had me so wound up? It was a different sort of walk down memory lane than say a journal, and one I found much more raw and honest, if disjointed. And oddly affirming.
it's funny that this came across my radar - earlier this week i was excavating my old emails for the first time ever and it was so painful. i had the reckoning, like you did, finding that my words didn't match with the memories of myself. there's a friendship breakup i went through in 2012 and i had such strong memories of the way she wasn't there for me, but i didn't realise my words were also callous and careless too. it wasn't the one-sided breakup i remembered. it's awful going through my emails and at the same time cathartic to release my past selves. we're not meant to keep our words forever, i think?
The emails I sent to my high school boyfriend are ... something else. haha I'm mortified
Show me show me!! 🤣
You know how sometimes you randomly remember something embarrassing from a hundred years ago and then proceed overthink about it for at least 24 hours, which is absurd because it's in the freaking past? That is definitely what will happen to me if I start looking at my email archives. Of course, now I'm curious though! I was so optimistically ambitious in my 20's, I kind of want to read the pitches I blindly sent.
Lol you have just described 99% of my waking hours. But if you find anything fun and not overly anxiety-inducing plz send it to me!!
This is precisely what I did!!
Great idea! If people are at a loss for which emails to send, or where even to begin looking, they might take inspiration from an art project Miranda July did via newsletter back in 2013. Over 20 weeks, she sent 20 issues featuring emails from the Sent Mail folders of people like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Lena Dunham, Kirsten Dunst, and six of her other friends in various fields. It was a collaborative art project newsletter called We Think Alone.
Each weekly collection of sent emails followed a single theme in this order:
An Email About Money
An Email That Gives Advice
An Email That Mentions Barack Obama
A Business Email
An Email That Includes A Picture of Something You Want
An Email To Your Mom
An Email That Includes A Dream You Had
An Email That Includes A Picture of Art
An Email Where You Describe What You’re Working On
An Email You Decided Not To Send
An Email That Includes A Picture of Yourself
An Email With I Love You In It
An Email With A Link In It
An Email About Being Sad
An Email About A Fear
An Angry Email
An Email That Includes A Song
An Email That’s An Apology
An Email About The Body
An Email About A Problem You’re Having With Your Computer
When I launched my own newsletter, I took this as inspiration for my first issue: https://ironicsans.beehiiv.com/p/001-like-proust-but-for-email
COMPLETELY forgot about this ... belated thanks!!
I wrote about my inbox last year! "The subject lines merged into their own stories as I clicked, scrolled, dragged, and dropped my way through my own personal history."
You can read it here :) https://kendallco.substack.com/p/reading-between-the-lines-of-an-email
Oh, I LOVE this. Thank you. Will link to it in Saturday's newsletter!!
This is a great antidote for my nostalgia. In addition to being a jerk, my emails remind me that I was also highly insecure and self-absorbed in my early twenties. Grateful to be turning 40 and leaving that shit (mostly) behind.
I love that. There's a strain of try-hard insecurity in some of my old emails that I'm also happy to have jettisoned with age ...
hey so this prompted me to check my oldest emails (also from 2006!) and i am now crying reading my teenage emails to my grandma. (unironically) thank you! x
Ahh gosh I know the feeling. I found a ton of emails from my late uncle, who was like a grandfather to me -- I had completely forgotten we emailed so much, and that his email style was so off-the-wall/goofy. Hope they're all good memories. <3
I love running across fellow nostalgiaphiles!
I've been raiding my old email accounts for some while now and there are some others than are long dormant and I have no way of reclaiming. There is an email account from the late 90s-early 00s that I wish I could dig up since that was a very personally turbulent period of my life.
Phone texts might be an extension of this but since I didn't start using a smart phone until April 22, most are pretty recent.
I would kill to access my old texts!! But for better or worse (... probably mostly better), those are all lost to the void forever.
Thanks for the note David. :)
Just FYI, I tried forwarding the email to you rather than the form and it was returned by Gmail saying "address not found". Because of course I had to add a commentary ;-)
I uploaded a PDF to share it with you though.
Thank you!! I haven't started reading them yet but am ... extremely looking forward to it.
it's funny that this came across my radar - earlier this week i was excavating my old emails for the first time ever and it was so painful. i had the reckoning, like you did, finding that my words didn't match with the memories of myself. there's a friendship breakup i went through in 2012 and i had such strong memories of the way she wasn't there for me, but i didn't realise my words were also callous and careless too. it wasn't the one-sided breakup i remembered. it's awful going through my emails and at the same time cathartic to release my past selves. we're not meant to keep our words forever, i think?
Love this!
And so glad I didn't delete emails over the years, especially the first ones between now husband and I, and the ones from right after I got fired and started my own business (now 20 years old. Thanks Ex-Boss for the best thing to ever happen to me!).
Submitted my hubs and I's 2009 exchange --
a) me thanking him (via a mass group email) for coming to my "meet new people in non horrible ways" event,
b) him sending me a thanks for "doing what I do," and
c) me suggesting we "grab BBQ" sometime (we had talked about our love of spreadsheets + BBQ at the event).
The rest, as they say, is history. 😍
Thanks for noodling on this topic, was fun to relive so many pivotal had no idea they were pivotal moments.
Your project to collect long-lost emails for an artsy compilation sounds fascinating! What inspired you to explore email as a form of intimate storytelling, and how do you think these digital artifacts differ from other memory-keeping mediums like photos or journals?
UGH nothing like uncovering several thousands of emails your awful high school boyfriend sent when you'd both been grounded and had your phones taken away but no one thought to ban you from gmail LOL. Mortifying.
Haha it's a hard look down the past, thank you for this. A quick 10min search yielded old cringey emails with my long distance American boyfriend from 2012 and the last break up email - which i didnt search for - from another boy I loved desesperatly in 2016 telling me he'll never speak or see me again which he still does almost 10 years later, and I was touched to rediscover the way he wrote to me.
It's a catalogue of my study years, from uni application to essays sent to professors... I lived in Japan and it also contains exchanges with students I taught whose names i had forgotten ...
I'll save them for one day I'm feeling inquisitory or nostalgic... in some ways it's even more raw and soul revealing than my paper journals...
Here's a worrisome aspect to all the mail and photos and ... that billions of us are storing for posterity: "Every time you post to Instagram, you’re turning on a light bulb forever" - https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/07/how-much-data-ai-use/678908/
A few weeks ago I opened my old gmail
account I used from 2003-2010 and man, the memories hit me like a truck! So, I totally get your post. Like you, I spent several days just going down the list, reading thru it all. Some I tossed, some I shared, some I archived, and a few I printed out. I laughed and cried but also struggled to put several into context - what had me so wound up? It was a different sort of walk down memory lane than say a journal, and one I found much more raw and honest, if disjointed. And oddly affirming.
it's funny that this came across my radar - earlier this week i was excavating my old emails for the first time ever and it was so painful. i had the reckoning, like you did, finding that my words didn't match with the memories of myself. there's a friendship breakup i went through in 2012 and i had such strong memories of the way she wasn't there for me, but i didn't realise my words were also callous and careless too. it wasn't the one-sided breakup i remembered. it's awful going through my emails and at the same time cathartic to release my past selves. we're not meant to keep our words forever, i think?