Thank you to Yahoo! Mail for sponsoring this post about staying connected. I was selected for this sponsorship by the Clever Girls Collective, which endorses Blog With Integrity, as I do.

Today will be a big day for my oldest, seven-year-old Charlie:

He’s getting his very own e-mail address!

We’re setting him up with his own e-mail (that will be HIGHLY regulated by us, as in we will be checking his in-box for him and logging on with him side-by-side) and so he can write to his grandparents and family members.

Will Charlie send emails about his new baby sister? Or (more likely) about the antics of his friends and teammates?

How old was I when I first used e-mail? I was TWENTY years old and the year was 1995. This is how ancient I am:

• When I arrived at college in 1993, I owned a Smith-Carona word processor, not a computer!

• When I first started sending emails in 1995 (usually joke forwards like the Neiman-Marcus cookie recipe and run-downs of the Darwin Awards), I had to visit the college computer lab. This now reminds me of episodes of Little House on the Prairie, when the folks would walk over the general store to mail a letter.

• My first e-mail address was affiliated with my university and had to be surrendered upon graduation. I then used my work email for all personal communications (NOT SMART!) and entertained my office’s system administrator with my boy trouble-filled missives to friends and happy hour notices.

• I didn’t obtain my first web-based email addy which I could take with me no matter where I matriculated or worked or which Internet provider I used until 1998 (what a dummy!).

But although I was always woefully behind the times with email, as someone who adores to write and loves to connect with her family and friends, from the minute I got into this medium of communication, I was hooked.

Nowadays with social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter that allow us to quickly ping our friends and send them shout-outs, a nice, newsy, personal EMAIL letter sent from one person to another is like gold. It’s the online equivalent of a fancy thank you note on engraved stationery. There is nothing more personal and loving and special these days than receiving a real, honest-to-goodness email from a friend or family member in your in-box.

So as Charlie embarks on his new email journey, I’m resolving to send more to my loved ones. I’ll be doing less @-ing and wallposts, and instead actually typing out the greeting “Dear”.

Crazy, huh?

Here’s a cute video from Yahoo! Mail that Charlie and I enjoyed together…although he did point out that I don’t travel without him very much and have never been to China, so he’s going to be emailing Grandma in California instead!

Do you have a love affair with email too? Share your experiences on Twitter and Facebook using the hashtag #EmailLove. or better yet: send an email to someone you love!