This is going to make me sound like a complete Luddite. Or maybe just a simpleton.
I have an email address. It’s an AOL email address from way back when AOL was still considered cutting edge. I’ve been using it for around twenty years and it works just fine. And it’s easy for me to check and store my email by going to AOL.
I had a problem this week with my ISP, which is Time Warner/Spectrum (and that’s a whole separate issue). When I finally got somebody on the phone to tell them about the problem, he mentioned they had sent my emails about this. I told them truthfully I had never received any emails from them. He said they would have been sent to my Spectrum address. I cleverly responded “My what now?”
Turns out I’ve had an email account for several years that I have never been aware of. Being as I have never suffered from any lack due to this ignorance, I’m not too worried about it. I obviously never gave this email address to anyone.
But I am curious. I kind of want to see what emails have been piling up in this account over the years.
Then I realized I have no idea how to access this email. I can’t access it though AOL like I do with my real email address. And I’m embarrassed to admit this but I don’t know how people with non-AOL email addresses read their email. If you have a generic email account, where do you go to read your email?
And what about passwords? I always thought email accounts were password protected to keep other people from reading your email. But I was never given any password connected to this address.
I’m going to say this to say it, if it doesn’t apply to you, that’s okay…first, you have to get it out of your head that AOL is the internet. Even if you’re still using their software (both of my parents do), it’s still not the internet, it’s just a conduit to the internet.
In any case, get on to the internet in whatever why you choose. At the top of this page, where it says boards . straightdope . com / something something something. That’s where YOU normally type (if you’re not using aol software) aol . com. Other people type gmail . com or mail . yahoo . com etc.
As for the time warner email address. I’d have to poke around, but I’ll bet if you go time Spectrum.net and log into your account, you might find a way to start from there. If nothing else, call them back and ask them. Tell them you were told they sent you an email to your Spectrum address. Ask them how you check that (what’s the website), and ask them for your log in credentials.
While you’re at it, also ask them to change your email account on file back to your AOL one so you actually get any communications they’re sending you.
Spectrum has web access for everything. If you’ve never created an online account with them, you should call and get them to walk you through it and set you up right then. Once you have the online account going, you will be able to access your mail through your browser.
Update, I went to the website I gave you and logged into my account. Click on the My Profile tab, then near the bottom it says “Email Preferences”. Click there to expand it and hit “Learn More”.
That spawned a new tab that didn’t parse correctly, but there were a bunch of links and one of them said “Check Email”. I did that and clicked a button that said “Forgot my email”. In order to get it, I needed the Mac address from my cable modem, which I can’t access from work, so that’s a dead end from now, but you could try that and see what happens.
OTOH, I’m still not against calling them and making them walk you through this since they screwed it up for you.
There are many reasons to give out and use more than one address (dealing with different clients/groups/accounts, privacy/anonymity, spam traps, etc), but nobody wants to access dozens of different places (and manage that many passwords) to see all the mail. A reasonable solution is to set up all the email addresses to forward everything to a single server you are happy with, where it gets filtered and sorted into folders, and you access it via a single portal which could be a web page, smartphone, or whatever you prefer.
An exception would be to keep things like personal and professional or business email completely separate. It is a bad idea to mix those up, or to forget that email is not actually private.
I am aware of this. Pretty much the only thing I do on AOL is check my mail.
That said, I feel dumb for not thinking of the obvious and checking Time Warner’s website. I found their mail location easily enough. Of course, they want me to enter my password to check my email. The normal route of having a password emailed to me is obviously out. The alternate route involves captchas and getting ID numbers off my cable box and I’m not feeling like that tonight. Maybe if I get bored this weekend.
Does your cable box need a password to connect? That is most likely your email password, if you haven’t changed your router password. If you have, it is likely the original password that you had. I would first try the box credentials before trying anything else.