Mixed results.

When I had Vonage, you had to opt in to call 911, which is a odd to say the least, but it worked great on DSL, not so much on cable.

I share your addiction to email, as do we all I think.

I don't so much love email as am addicted to it. I can tell because of how I feel when it doesn't work. Cue the Zoloft commercial. And don't let me get a smart phone.

The followup line to that (by David Spade) was:
“Well I should hope so, I'm laying it on pretty thick.”

I certainly would have been able to maintain friendships more easily had email been around back then (wow…did I just say that?). I remember exchanging letters once or twice with a few phone calls between before it just kind of died on the vine.

Email took away all the geographical constraints.

Re. the time being off, must be related to Disqus, since we were on regular old WP comments for a while and then imported them into Disqus.

Check out what's next to each reply name

Why I hate email:
1. There's a record.

I'm a fanboi (sp -10) of email I guess.

My wife had issues with Classmates too, their upsells seems pretty shady.

I don't have a trick with email. I keep up with it and eliminate bacn and spam when I don't want it. Frankly, I don't get what's so hard about staying on top of it.

That said, it's odd to me that people who can't keep up ask for more, which is why I've begun to think amount of email is a busy badge to some. Would be nice if all that email actually did something, a la Posterous, Sandy, TripIt, etc.

The more fundamental problem is, how do you (the general clueless user) know you aren't about to get redirected to a hacksite?

I finally signed up to facebook, what's the first thing it does? Tries to access your address book. Can't access my mail app, funny thing. And the general user, and their friends who aren't users, wonder why someone they don't know is sending them invites to view their pictures.

Just finally brought up Thunderbird, with two decades of email, since CS4 (the compuserve app, try googling that) finally shut down. So I had to move my personal web page somewhere, so I moved it to my general isp. Now most businesses can't get to my web page because nannyware blocks it as adult and sexual content. I wish. Naturally I only noticed that after a week or so of sending out business emails with my same old web site url (which I simply redirected from c$erve to members.cox.net. Gee members, cox, what could be adult or sexual about that?). Their support didn't even respond to my inquiry about that. Which is natural, because the blocking is completely outside of their or my control. Fortunately I use other ISP's, but it's Yet Another Useless Non-Productive Web Presence Task.

I can understand the allure of anti-social networks.

Funny, a year ago I replied to the death of an inbox post with a reference to meatworld. A few weeks ago I referenced your reference to the term meat space with a posting I made ten years before (exactly, which made it strange enough to bother), but that disappeared into the ether. Or maybe I'm just dreaming all of this because I have 1000 unread emails after spam removal, not including the mail mentioned above. But none at work, except for oracle-l digests. I read that as a digest because otherwise it is way too annoying, I'd have to turn off email notifications. But reading it as a digest is awful, the way people top post including what they are responding to. If you post, it goes straight to spam-generators.

I think the trick is to organize domains and email addresses so you can ignore most, and only important things get to bother you. Any product driver would need to account for that somehow. The amount of control you perceive you have over metering email is pretty directly related to how stressful you see it.