I’ve mentioned pandoc once before, and it’s again proved rather useful. I’ve been looking for more ways to use it, as I love its core principle (although I naturally wish that it focused on reStructuredText rather than Markdown) of being a comprehensive text format converter. It might at one point be the answer for getting from reST to PDF—something that the current reST tools don’t help me with because I insist on using Unicode, and XeTeX isn’t yet supported. But today pandoc helped with a different task: going from reST to plain text.
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Not content with merely using Vim to compose email messages, I’m trying out Muttator, a Thunderbird plugin that aims to add Vim-like keybindings.
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It’s possible to get Thunderbird to use Vim as an external editor for email, and while it’s a little clunky, it works.
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I can be a terrible correspondent. I go through patches, some of them years long, where, unless I respond to an email immediately (which is essentially a function of chance), I might not respond ever. This becomes cumulatively worse very quickly, because I become more and more overwhelmed by the sheer amount of stuff in my inbox, and this makes me less willing to engage with older emails.

Recently, I’ve figured out some methods for dealing with it better.

(To those of you who are owed email from me who are still reading this: you might receive long-overdue replies in the near future, even if they’re to messages that could be classified as “ancient”.)
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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.
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Every few months I get a wave of bounceback messages from a variety of email servers, caused by some spammer(s) using my domain as the domain for their From addresses. This morning I probably received over three hundred of them, and that was a relatively small number in comparison to some prior instances.
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It’s not, as a co-worker claimed today, because I’m a Luddite. And, despite often feeling as if I’m against it, I’m not actually against the technological capability to send and received HTML-formatted messages via email.
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