Email: The Resurrection
.Dramatic title, I know, but I’ve been operating with greatly-diminished email capabilities since the end of June this year, when a spam burst knocked out my server—that’s what first forced the move to this “temporary” blog, and then in July a much worse burst of it made my mail more or less unmanageable on that server. It’s taken me until today to really recover from that.
I exacerbated the problem by not deciding immediately what the plan would be, and ended up having email kind of go to two places at once for a while, which just isn’t good. In the end, I had to copy everything that was on the original server onto the new server (which isn’t in my apartment, a good thing because it means some greater reliability, a bad thing because it means I haven’t revived my subversion repository yet), and then wade through the spam.
There were more than 70000 messages in my inbox at the start of said wading. I got to know mutt, the console email client, a lot better while getting rid of this. One day of culling took it to about 18000, and then another down to under 1400, at which point I decided that, finally, it was reasonable to expect Thunderbird to deal with it over IMAP.
So, finally, I can deal with email in the way I prefer to deal with it, and hopefully this means that I will email more reliably. There’s no real reason that mutt wasn’t sufficient, of course, but given how bad I can be at replying, any additional friction at all can have very bad effects.
That excuse is now gone, as is the excuse of “I’ll reply to that after I fix my email”. I think this will make things a lot better; this may also (hopefully!) result in a flurry of “sorry you haven’t heard from me” emails going out.
(Of course, part of me wonders whether, in this span of time, almost everyone has switched to e.g. Facebook and is reading this thinking “who emails anymore?”)
24 Dec 2008 at 02:57
I got an email bounced back to me only yesterday that I sent you when your father passed away… did you ever get it, love?