Having one e-mail is bad enough. But, most people with computers have at least two: one for home and one for the workplace. The truth is most likely that most people have only one e-mail address, the one for their job, in which they access primarily at work and perhaps at home (like many academics). For the adjunct instructor, having e-mails from their colleges can multiply twofold, threefold, or even fourfold or fivefold.
With one e-mail address, one has to filter through spam, forwards, and the messages that really matter. With college issued e-mail addresses, there is always plenty of spam. Everyone, from the president to the janitor*, has something to announce. Most of the time, the subject lines help in sorting through this digital clutter, but not always. Then, there are the department wide-emails. Department chairs or their assistants usually have the wisdom to send these to the teachers’ primary e-mail addresses, but not always. Then, there are the frantic e-mails from students. The not so frantic students also send messages, but the desperate always outnumber the others. One has to remind the students to specify which class they are from, as a note without context is confusing. As I mentioned earlier, one address is bad enough, but multiply that by the number of colleges where an adjunct teaches, and there’s a nightmare.
If managing all of one’s electronic notes seem chaotic, then the issue of available space seems to only compound it. Full-time professors can let their office computers get cluttered with all the e-mail they want, but not the adjuncts. It’s often more practical to access them from a web-based server (usually supported by Outlook) than it is to use an e-mail program on a PC. However, if one stores too many messages, even important ones, space becomes an issue. Then, the server automatically sends nasty messages reminding the user available server space is running out.
The only solution I can think of is to create a Gmail or Yahoo e-mail account and set it up so the school related e-mails will come to one address. It saves the trouble of multiple log-in. However, it doesn’t necessarily solve the problem of keeping track of too many details, which is hard enough with one e-mail address.
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