Sunday, December 24

Marilyn and I each have a new mobile phone for Christmas.  Mine is a hand-me-down from Jamie but it's an iPhone 6+ so I'm not complaining.  Marilyn likes a smaller phone so she has a sparkling new iPhone 5S.  When I started to transfer my contacts and so on from the old phone to my new one, I was surprised to see that I had around 20000 saved messages, although it's probably more accurate to call them accumulated rather than saved because no conscious decision was made to hold on to them.

For some reason, Gmail downloads my messages in three areas: Primary, Social and Promotions.  It's in the Promotions area that most of the trouble is caused.  Every time I click on a website, some robot snatches my email address and starts the process of sending me unsolicited messages which end up in my Promotions folder.  Because I don't find the idea of Promotional Messages interesting, I seldom look there and the pile builds up.  

I also discovered a cache of old messages in a folder entitled Personal.  They are mostly dated 2010 and it seems I went through a stage of putting aside messages I thought worth keeping, but that resolution didn't last long. There was a similar folder for Travel with old itineraries and flight information. Some of the messages even went back to 2005 but because I had forgotten them and never looked at them again, they have gone forever.

So, my old phone has been set aside to be passed on to someone who likes Samsungs.  My only issue is that my iPhone has been operational since Wednesday and I haven't had any calls yet.  I reassure myself that people are too busy at this time of year to make calls but I suspect that is just rationalisation.