E-mail, I <3 You!

Currently, I think I have five e-mail accounts. There could be more. But the main ones I use are my Yahoo account and Comcast. I use Yahoo most often, because it's the one most of my friends use to contact me. I set up Comcast as a way to filter spam, since I got absolutely no noise there. My intention was to use it solely for school or job-related things, but I am more neglectful in checking on it.

I can't remember how or why I have a gmail account, but I rarely check it. My friend Corina started a hotmail account for me, which she also used to start a MySpace page for me, both of which I almost never use. And then there's the school's pdx.edu account. I don't even know how to log into that, so there are probably at least twenty thousand messages in that box. So, the more unread messages I feel are sitting in that box, the less likely I feel like checking it.

My e-mail habit began at a young age, when I was married to a Marine. During his first deployment to the Western Pacific, we did not have e-mail accounts, and we were stuck with hand-written letters. Sometimes, weeks at a time went by between letters, then I'd get like five at once. We even had to number them to avoid confusion in the conversation. During the second deployment, we bought a laptop for him to take on the ship, and that made things both better and worse for us. Better, because we had more frequent and immediate communication, and worse because we could argue on it. We made good use of WRITING IN CAPITAL LETTERS TO SIMULATE SHOUTING. Since the e-mail was the old odin, DOS- based kind, we couldn't pepper our messages with sweet little emoticons, so we had to settle for the standard colon-dash-end parenthesis. Man, those were the old days, back in the late 90's...

Life is a whole lot better now with the ability to send attachments and live hyperlinks, and to paste photos in the body of your text when you feel like it. I'm sure that makes it more complicated for deployed military personnel, though-- maybe e-mail communication isn't even allowed on aircraft carriers anymore, for reasons of security. How easy is it to intercept an e-mail that may contain classified information? How secure is e-mail in general?