Does Bill Gates have email? The Queen of England? The Pope? The president? I mean, a personal email address. If Melinda Gates is out on the road can she send an email directly to Bill? If so, is it just a normal account or does it have some kind of special protection on it so that only particular people can send email to it? Or does it get filtered through a group of personal assistants? (I wouldn’t imagine a husband would want personal assistants triaging email from his wife…)
Like most of us, they may have a few emails. One might be for personal staff, one for business and another for friends and family. If one of them were to get breeched, they can get a new one easily enough.
An acquaintance of my ex-wife was briefly very famous in a fifteen minutes of fame kind of way. She had a standard hotmail account and then when too many people found out about it, an email went out to her contacts with a new account from Yahoo I think. Now she has her own domain.
I work with a celebrity, he’s definitely got his own e-mail address. TV guy, not a major movie star, but still. We e-mail him as needed for work related things, and he also has a blackberry for when email just isn’t fast enough. :dubious:
As he’s gotten bigger and bigger over the years, we now tend to email his personal assistant instead, so she can compile the emails he needs to respond to and bring them to his attention when he’s got time to deal with them. She can also filter out emails as needed.
I’ve also worked with many other celebs through this show, and occasionally we need to contact them for various reasons. Some of these guys are major rock stars, actors, etc. They’ve all had zealously guarded personal email and cell phones we’ve used to communicate with them. We’re trusted to not give their info out, and to not contact them for non work related matters.
I’m assuming someone on the level of a head of state or head of a major corporation also has an assistant (or ten) to filter their email as needed. Maybe a super private personal address for a handful of people as well. Just a guess.
I think the Queen and Prince Phillip were given email addresses back in the 70s or 80s, but I highy doubt either of them actually use them.
I’ve emailed with an ex-president in the past who uses a very obscure email address & changes it every 2 or 3 months. It was something like g45dt6@gmail.com. Just random letters and numbers (and not gmail).
Bill Clinton had an e-mail address while in office. However, he only used it a few times. He knew that e-mail messages can hang around forever and he wanted to avoid that. That is good advice for many in the public eye and very smart for him.
That’s very true, but I never could figure out why someone would forego email altogether when all they would really need to do is avoid using it for things that could incriminate them.
I was wondering about this the other day, after hearing a film producer talking about emailing Lindsay Lohan - it must be very difficult for anyone very well-known to maintain a usable email account for any length of time - there are so many people out there who would want to know it, and others who would circulate it if it ever fell into their hands - and it’s hard to use email without your address becoming somewhat distributed.
Then I started tangentially wondering…
Does Steve Jobs have a Hotmail account?
Has Bill Gates ever purchased anything from the iTunes Store?
the problem is worse than that. People don’t use email to map out their next big crime. They make short comments that, when taken out of context, can be read in incriminating ways. Just ask Bill Gates. Back in the 90s he (like most people) never dreamed his emails would be used in court against him. His comments about his business practices had a significant effect on the outcome when Microsoft lost their monopoly case in the US. Even if he wasn’t engaged in illegal activities, he certainly sounded like it. That is the curse of email. Not only might it be used against you it might be misused against you.
Being a technophobe is SOP for a exec. They use email-but often the message just says: call me.
Bush stopped using e-mail:
http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=E3C6AE39-3048-5C12-001400CDBFDC3ECD
I worked at AOL for a while back in the day. I spoke with Trent Reznor’s attorney. Trent was on tour and forgot his password. He had his lawyer call to get it changed. We couldn’t do that w/o a power of attorney, so he sent one in. I was really tempted to tell the lawyer ‘Hey, the only way to do this is if I speak to Trent. I must speak with Trent.’. So I knew his email. I also at one point knew Joe Satriani’s email address, another rep spoke with him about a tech problem which I ended up reviewing and offered advice on (I was help desk).
Another rep got Barbara Bush. There were a couple other famous people who used AOL and called in for various reasons but I can’t seem to remember more names.
Slee
Note, Steve Case was the president of AOL at the time and his email was just Steve IIRC.
Of course we do.
Oops, I’ve said too much. 
No.
Of course they do.
They’re just not going to tell you the address.
double fuiicked babe steelpegs
Because then they’ll get things like that (taken from the first message currently in my Inbox. I mean Trashcan.
apparently, he gets around 4 million e-mails a day :eek:
QEII can be contacted here
It will probably just disappear down the intertubes though.
It’s not that hard to set up your e-mail filters to reject all messages except those that come from certain addresses. No reason a celebrity wouldn’t do something like that.
They aren’t enemies, just competitors. As far as I know, they’re friendly acquaintances, and undoubtedly have used each other’s product or service from time to time.
I know, it’s just an interesting thing to ponder.
Not that he’s super-famous, but I do know Bill Bryson’s personal email address, as he has written for the publication I work for.
(And of course, Douglas Adams used to post on Usenet using his own email address, unhidden, back in the innocent days of the early 90s…)
I expect they’ll get that anyway. Spam seems to find you no matter how you try to hide.
What they will get, and are probably fairly keen to avoid, is endless requests for sex, requests for soiled underwear, begging letters, death threats, spooky stalker declarations of undying love, chatty questions about their work, etc.