Email yourself later

Someone who wishes to remain anonymous (Robert Stevens from San Antonio, TX) told me about a site which would allow me to email myself, in the future. When in the future you ask? Well according to the online web form, I can email myself on any date from January 1, 2007 through December 31, 2037. Of course there are some problems with this idea.

1.	Changing Addresses Who knows what my email address will be in 30 years. I change email addresses like I change underwear, once every couple of months. If I were to actually maintain the same email address for 1 year, I’m pretty sure that I would be receiving so much spam I could start a spam business whereby I could threaten to send people spam if they didn’t give me money.
2.	Spam When you send yourself an email for a future date, who knows if the sending domain will not be in a spam list by that time and you won’t get it? Maybe it could be assumed to be junk email and you won’t see it. In this case if you were to place the domain on a whitelist, the sending domain is actually different than the domain name shown. This would probably have problems with most anti-spam systems. Plus in the future there might be required email verification systems like SPF.
3.	Filter If the email makes it past whatever spam filtering you have in the future, you might just filter it visually and assume it to be junk or a waste of reading. I do that with stuff I send myself from the previous day.
4.	Domain Registration Given that the registered domain is currently set to expire on August 12, 2008 what will happen if you ask for an email on August 13th, 2008 or thereafter? Chances are that there will be an update to the registration at least once, but what are the odds that it will be a 30 year add-on? And if they were going to do the 100-year domain registration, why not offer a 100-year email option instead of just 30 years?
5.	Email Annoyance I’m not too sure if I’m willing to give out my email address to an unknown site, even if Matt Sly is a nice guy in some way. Sorry Matt, maybe you can comment about this and let me know that there’s a future for emailing myself.

I’ll Ignore Myself For Now
Though the idea does seem like an intriguing one, I would rather respond to the Microsoft UK Lottery or something along those lines, at least until I hear a good reason to send my future self an email I will most likely just bag as spam.