Not long ago, I added a few additional e-mail addresses, in the process of signing up with GeoCities, in order to be able to add some free web pages. Now, my primary e-mail address was, and still is, my hotmail account. But since it was free to add some additional e-mail accounts hosted by Yahoo! (and since Yahoo! Mail seemed to offer a few cool features not offered by my Hotmail Plus account, such as the online Notepad), I figured I'd go ahead and use those e-mail boxes, too, just to keep the accounts active.
One benefit of the Yahoo! Mail accounts is that Yahoo! allows one to set up two different e-mail addresses for each free e-mail account. Now, when I say two different addresses, I don't mean that each of those addresses has its own In box. No, it's more like the second address is an "alias" you can use when sending out e-mail messages. So, with regard to my e-mail account consisting of the address markwilliampettigrew@yahoo.com, I can either choose to send out messages using that address, or I can send out messages using the address anartisticchristian@yahoo.com. There may be cases in which I want recipients to see my name, and other cases where I'd prefer for my e-mail address to describe me, since my name may not mean "diddly squat" to them.
Also, when running printed or online classified ads, I might not want readers of those ads to see my name. Of course, some places, such as CraigsList.org, mask one's real e-mail address anyway, unless you choose not to do so, but others (such as classified ads in print publications) do not. So I figured that the secondary address would enable me to run ads and to choose whether or not I wanted my actual name to be displayed in those ads.
In fact, at one point, I actually created a second, separate Yahoo! e-mail account (mark.pettigrew@yahoo.com) along with its own secondary e-mail address (artistic.christians@yahoo.com) as well. That wasn't entirely intentional. As I recall, I initially set that account up when I was setting up my image hosting account at Flickr.com. (Flickr.com is now a part of Yahoo!, so one can sign on there using one's Yahoo! username and password.) In any event, the end result was that in addition to my Hotmail account, I now had two additional e-mail accounts, consisting of four different e-mail addresses. They were free accounts, so I knew that I'd have to regularly use them (at least once every 4 months for each account, I believe) if I wanted them to stay "activated". But I figured that wouldn't take a whole lot of time to do so, and I figured that it would be beneficial to have other addresses I could use (and, as a consequence, more storage space for incoming messages, to supplement the already substantial storage space offered by my Hotmail Plus account).
Naturally, I wanted to test those accounts to make sure they worked. So I sent messages to my Hotmail account for that purpose. But only a few of those messages were going through, and I couldn't quite figure out why. I even set all four addresses up in my Safe List at the Hotmail account, and still, some of them were being blocked, or at least that seemed to be the case. Even worse, they weren't even being sent to my "junk mail" folder. I just wasn't getting them at all. It was very frustrating, and I ended up spending an hour or more working on the issue, trying to get messages from all four Yahoo! e-mail addresses to go through to my Hotmail account. I made a few adjustments to my Hotmail settings, thinking maybe that would help, but it didn't seem to help at all. I went to bed rather tired and frustrated.
Today, I opened the Hotmail account, and lo and behold, the messages I had previously failed to get were waiting for me in my In box. (Unfortunately, so was some digital junk mail, including a very unwanted message soliciting my business for a product which would ostensibly enlarge my sex organ. In my opinion, the people who send out such e-mail messages are idiots, and antisocial idiots at that. But it only took a few minutes to mark the messages I didn't want and hit Delete.) So it would seem that the new e-mail accounts are working, and that was really my main reason for sending messages from those accounts to my Hotmail account. I just wanted confirmation that they were working properly.
Well, actually, I was able to confirm that 3 of the 4 addresses were able to send messages to my Hotmail account. (mark.pettigrew@yahoo.com, markwilliampettigrew@yahoo.com and anartisticchristian@yahoo.com all seemed to work. I'm not quite sure about the 4th address, artistic.christians@yahoo.com. I'm going to have to try using that one again, so as to make sure it's working as well.)
Now, you'd think that having a single e-mail address was enough of a headache, without adding additional headaches to deal with, particularly in terms of the time it takes to delete unwanted messages. But some of my plans rely heavily on my ability to send e-mail messages to potential supporters of the ministry of the arts to which I believe God has called me (since I don't have enough money for more traditional direct mail advertising). And having multiple addresses may be beneficial in that regard. Time will tell.
NOTE:
In addition to my Blogger.com blog site, I recently started a second, free blog (http://saltandlight.lifewithchrist.org) hosted by an organization named Life with Christ (http://lifewithchrist.org). If you've read the posts at this site, you already know that I'm a Christian. So it was natural for me to create that site, once I discovered the options offered by that organization.
In particular, one good thing about having a second blog hosted by Life with Christ has been that it has enabled me to connect with a community of other Christians, in a way which wasn't really happening with this blog, even prior to the time when I disabled the Comments feature on this site.
I will continue to periodically make contributions to this site as well, particularly in cases where I want to talk about subjects which aren't necessarily related to my Christian faith. But I invite anyone visiting this site to visit my Life with Christ blog site.
UPDATE: For reasons I will very likely explain in another blog post, I no longer have the blog post at LifeWithChrist.org. Blogging there was a good experience in some respects and a bad experience in other respects. This is now my primary personal blog once again.
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