I've had a few different email addresses over the past several years, and as a result of my anal retentiveness, I'm compelled to at least occasionally check each address in the off chance that someone from one of my former lives has emailed me and I have the desire to communicate with them.  If I think about it, this has happened approximately zero times in my lifetime, leading to the obvious question of why I continue doing it.  That question can't be answered, so I must continue doing it. 

With the advent of Gmail, all my email from every one of my former addresses can be forwarded and stored indefinitely, without the slightest fear of overfilling my storage space.  But each email addresses carries with it a certain amount of spam.  Emailing forwarding doesn't think about spam vs. not spam, so I get about 5 times the amount of spam I should be getting. 

Every once in a while, I look through my spam folder to see if anything got filtered that shouldn't have gotten filtered.  As I'm glancing at hundreds of emails, I usually start thinking about how futile my efforts are.  Would it really be so bad if I didn't get somebody's email?  When I find ones that accidentally got filtered, I usually conclude that life could've easily gone on as normal if I hadn't received that email.  Email is known to be a fairly unreliable method of communication, what with spam filters, unreliable and misunderstood computers, and restrictive corporate email policies.  So most email communication is conducted with the forethought of "If I really need to contact him, I'll just call him." 

But despite my conclusion that it's a complete waste of time, I still do it occasionally.  Anal retentiveness wins again.