Email Mountains

Email. Sigh. How does anyone keep up with it?

I am notoriously bad about this. I do manage to delete the promotional emails I'm not interested in. Without unsubscribing because I want those sale prices when I'm ready to buy.

I mostly handle personal emails okay.

My big problem is the semi-promotional emails with information in them.

Especially when the information is related to promotion of my books. Or maybe writing craft. I want to read these emails--really, I do--but not right then. The problem is that I never get back to them. I even created a special label for them. To_Read_Writing.

I've read nothing! I even added it to my habit tracker in the hope of getting to these emails so I can delete them. It didn't help. Not that I have a good track record with habit trackers, but still.

I know the prevailing wisdom is handle it once, but I'm usually busy. My primary inbox is up to 268 emails. My special brand new writing label is at 263. Updates at 2,210 emails. There are more labels than this, loaded with stuff I need to do something with.

It's overwhelming, especially when I don't want to spend time going through this mess. 

It's Cryptic

I'm used to getting emails from companies where it's spelled right out who is sending the email. Even the few author emails I used to subscribe to had first and last names to identify the sender. The designers of knitting patterns? Not so much.

At first, I thought it was only one or two doing this, but as I've joined more lists, I've noticed that almost every knitting designer does this. They send the email with only their first name.

Me: Who the hell is Megan?

Opens the email. Read enough to figure out that it's from a knitting designer who sells her patterns under a cute fiber name and not her real name. There is no way I'm going to associate Fun and Fiber (fake name) with Megan. If she'd sent it as Megan from Fun and Fiber, I'd be right there. If she sent it as Fun and Fiber, I'd know immediately, but simply sending it as Megan?

Caitlin does the same thing and a host of others too numerous to mention. In fact, of all the knitting designer newsletters I get, only two send under their full names and a third sends it as her cute fiber name. I know immediately who these emails are from.

Why is this a thing? All it does is leave me confused as to who's emailing me. I see Cute Fiber Name and I get excited. What new knitting pattern is available now? When I see Megan? I'm not excited because I'm too busy trying to figure out who this is. Maybe if she sent monthly newsletters, I'd remember who she is, but designers don't release a new pattern every month. In three or four months, I've forgotten that she only puts her first name on her emails.

As I was writing this blog post, Romance Writers of America sent me an email. It doesn't say RWA. It says it's from "Communications." I guess cryptic is spreading.

Stop Asking Me

Does anyone else get opinion surveys all the time?

I go to the doctor, I get a survey. I go to the car dealer to get service done, I get a survey. My house cleaner comes, I get a survey. I login to a writing group, there's a request for members to fill out a survey.

Stop asking me stuff all the time. I'm busy.

OMG, it's survey overload! I'm sure this does help them fine tune their operations. Usually everything is awesome when I go to the doctor. I rarely have to wait, not in the outside waiting room, not in the patient rooms. Everyone's friendly and things go smoothly. I'm sure the surveys played a part in this and that's great, but still.... Can we have a year off from the surveys?

And let me talk about the survey I got from Ford after I brought my car in to be serviced. I actually filled this thing out because while I was warned I'd have a two hour wait, I did not expect to be there for 5 1/2 hours! That was ridiculous. But I get to the end of the survey and they're going to tie my name and phone number to my responses. No. Absolutely not. I do not want to have a phone conversation with anyone from the dealer about why I was unhappy to spend most of my day in their service department waiting area.

Even though I'd spent quite a bit of time on this survey, I chose cancel rather than submit.

When you throw these surveys on top of all the retailer emails I get, I'm on overload. I'm even starting to unsubscribe from some of these emails out of self-defense. But retailers can be easily deleted. I always feel bad about deleting the surveys because (in most cases) I want the higher ups to know the person I dealt with was awesome, but I really just need everyone to stop asking me to rate them and comment.

Stop the Emails

Long time readers of my blog will know that I've complained about companies who sent me promotional emails daily. I said something like once a week is enough. Well, these companies have not heard my complaints. In fact, they've gone the other direction.

There are companies who are literally sending two and three emails a day!!!

The first email in the morning is usually the offer email. The second email will be a reminder and generally comes mid afternoon. The third email comes at night--sometimes really late for the east coast--telling me it's my last chance to get their fabulous offer.

Once a day was annoying enough. Two or three times a day is ridiculous. I'd been hesitant about unsubscribing because when I want to buy something, I'd like to see the deals available, but I can't do three emails a day from one company. I've started to click the unsubscribe button.

The smart companies will offer an option on their unsubscribe page to receive fewer emails. That's the option I click if it's available. The rest are just an unsubscribe.

What marketing genius said, Hey, this person signed up for our emails, let's bombard them until they hate us and never want to see an email from us again? That's how I'm feeling right now about a number of companies. We're not talking one or two doing this--it's at least a dozen!

Dear companies promoting via email. STOP it or I will unsubscribe from you, too!

These Are My Recommendations?

One of the marketing emails I get is from Audible with recommendations for books I might like to listen to. Here's a new book by one of your favorite authors! Or so they say. I open the email and almost every time it's recommending an author I don't remember ever reading/listening to before.

Audible is owned by Amazon and I thought they had some pretty strong algorithms based on past purchases. Literally 99% of the books I spend my credits on are non-fiction, but 99% of my recommendation emails are for fiction. Say what? Also, they seem to be heavily weighted toward authors that I downloaded via a free listen promotion. Um, just because I took advantage of the free book, doesn't mean I want to listen to every book that author has ever written.

I wondered if maybe my Audible recommendations were skewed by my Kindle purchases/downloads, but that doesn't seem to be the case. I get recommendations for books that I never downloaded in ebook form, but did download in Audio.

There was a free download of the book American Pharaoh because of the Kentucky Derby. Guess who's getting recommendations about books with horses now?

What I'd like to see is recommendations based on what I used credits for or even spent money to purchase. Free downloads are like, well, okay, yeah, maybe I'll listen to that some day and it's free so why not? They are not anything to base my likely future purchase history on.

My favorite audio books are educational. For example, The Great Courses which are recordings of college professors lecturing about subjects they teach about at university. I totally geek out over this and have a huge number of these in my library. Do you think I ever get a recommendation for another Great Courses listen? Do you think I get notified when there's a new Great Course available? The answer to this is apparently not.

Since Audible doesn't seem to know me at all, I mostly delete all their recommended listen emails after a quick scan. Just in case they finally figured me out.

***This blog is solely my own opinions and not sponsored in anyway. I pay for my Audible membership and my ebooks on my own with no promotional considerations of any kind.***

The Great Spam Debacle

I have more email accounts than one person should own, but I don't think I'm alone in that. What I do to keep things manageable is have Gmail retrieve my email from the various accounts. And then one day I stopped getting one of my accounts. It took me a couple of days to realize it and I went to investigate. After trying a variety of things, I ultimately was unable to fix it and so I disconnected the account and added it again.

And then the annoyances started.

First, Google decided to import all the email again. Everything. Years worth of email.

OMG! And it put 1500 of these email in spam although NONE of them actually were spam. I'd already vetted these notes on the other account. And once Gmail understood they weren't spam, it put all of them in my inbox. My inbox went from 40 to 1500+. This didn't make me happy.

I still have to finish sorting out all that email, but that's not the end of it.

Because Google put 1500 messages in spam, it's now sending me warnings about a spam attack. Every time I log in here to write a post, Google wants me to do a security check and "take action." No, I don't need to take action. There was no spam attack. It was you, Google! You! You put perfectly good email in the spam folder. Thousands of perfectly legitimate email. Sigh.

Tick Tock Treat Yourself

I receive a lot of promotional emails. Not spam. These are email lists I've actually signed up for and (mostly) want to get from various retailers. There's two tactics, though, for the title that make me insane every time I see them.

The first one is starting out the title with Tick Tock. I know why they use it--they want to signify that the sale/opportunity is nearing its end--but I still hate it. It seems very childish, almost condescending in a way. As if I can't order something I want on my own before the sale ends. If I wanted to buy something from your store, I would have. Stop sending me reminders and definitely don't use the phrase Tick Tock. It's pretty much guaranteed to make me hit the delete icon.

And since I mentioned it, there are a few retailers that insist on sending me up to three emails a day. I get the first one early in the morning telling me about the sale, at lunchtime there will be another email (this one usually has my name in the title), and then comes the third email in the evening. This is the Tick Tock email. Seriously, once a day is too much. Multiple times a day? Knock it off!

The second email title that I can't stand is Treat Yourself! This is often found in the body of promotional emails even if it's not in the title.

This one tries to use psychology and it's irritating. Buy something, whether you really need it or not, because you deserve it. You've been working hard at your job, at your home. Maybe something stressful is going on in your life. Or maybe you earned a raise at work. It's time to whip out the credit card and buy the totally unneeded product to clutter your house.

It makes me think of those holiday commercials for Lexus where they try to convince you that you deserve a car for the holidays. Treat yourself. Snort. I treat myself whenever I want to do so and I'm not going to fall for the psychological BS.

You're probably thinking I should unsubscribe from all these promo emails and save myself the aggravation, but I don't want to. When there's a sale or a really good coupon, I want to know about it. I just don't want to know about it three times in one day. Tick Tock.

Chaos and Confusion

My email is an organizational disaster. No lie. I also made my situation worse when I decided to consolidate several accounts. Gmail decided to bring over years worth of old email even though I only wanted those that were currently unread. I'm sure there was some kind of setting that I missed.

When I saw thousands of emails staring at me, I knew I needed to do something to mitigate this mess. Surely, there must be a faster method than slogging through them one at a time. I Googled.

I saw all kinds of organizational systems. From one guy saying you should never have more than five email folders (NO!) to another advocating breaking everything down into folders. I saw claims that folders didn't help anyone locate email and that search is faster. Someone else talked about giving emails very distinct, targeted titles. Which absolutely doesn't help since a lot of this email came from other people.

After all of my searching, I found nothing that gave me ideas on how to slog through my mess.

I made a few shortcuts of my own. When I found your item has shipped emails for things I've received (and since some of these emails are ten years old or more, they were most definitely received), I auto deleted them. Loop emails that were years old are gone. I figure any writing advice from ten years ago is obsolete by now. I found other things like this to speed things up.

After hours of work, things are better, but there's still a long way to go. I figure now, I go folder by folder and try to think of ways to shortcut that one particular label if I can, then move on to the next.

I'm estimating that my method will lead to an organized and efficient email collection by about 2057.

I'm Just Browsing

Off and on over the past few weeks, I've browsed for kitchen chairs. I'm not serious yet about buying any, but I want to see what's out there and how much they'd cost. However, because of cookies and overly aggressive marketing, I'm being bombarded with ads for chairs. Not just on websites I visit, but also in my email.

All of the sites where I've looked at chairs are now competing with each other for Facebook ads to display to me. I think they're on rotation right now as I see a different site pretty much every time I check my feed.

Other websites that that personalize ads are also displaying pictures of chairs I viewed on the websites I visited. It's pretty creepy and it puts my back up, making me less inclined to buy anything. When I mentioned this in a tweet to two of the sites which have been really bad about the cyber hard sell, one of them said clear your cookies. Sigh. I have cookies turned off on my laptop, but don't on my iPad. Clearing cookies there means having to login again to all my sites and I don't want to. I also feel I shouldn't have to do this to avoid all this personalized marketing crap.

One of the sites I've looked at has been bombarding me with emails every day highlighting the various chairs I've clicked at to view more closely. This is one avenue where online shopping falls down in comparison with in-store shopping.

In the store, I can tell the sales associate that I'm just browsing and that I'll find them if I need any help. They then leave me alone to check out the chairs in peace. When I walk out of the store after I'm done browsing, they don't follow me and hold up pictures of the chairs. They don't pass me notes warning me that they only have six sets of chairs in style A and that I better buy now. Nope, they let me leave and that's that.

Online... Sigh. Too needy. Too intrusive. Too much nagging, pestering, reminding. I wish they'd figure out an algorithm that would differentiate when someone is seriously looking with intent to buy and when someone is merely browsing. Then the site could target the serious shopper and leave me the hell alone. Gah!

Am I the only one that hates this so much that I'll probably spend my money at the least obnoxious store rather than the site that won't leave me alone? The price would have to be drastically better at the obnoxious site before they'd see a penny of my money.

Great Email Mystery

The other day, I received an email. That in itself isn't weird. I receive lots of email every day, but this email was stranger than some of the spam I've gotten. This email was to tell me about town hall meetings with a Utah congressman. In Utah.

Um, I don't live in Utah. I've never lived in Utah. The only time I was ever in Utah was when I changed planes in Salt Lake City. I don't think this qualifies me to receive email notices.

You're thinking, I bet it was a phishing email. Nope. I checked into it and it was a legitimate email from a real US congressman in Washington DC sent through the man's official congressional email address.

I'm seriously at a loss here. I could understand if it were a Minnesota senator or congressman because I lived there most of my life. It would make sense if it were from a Georgia legislator since that's where I moved when I left Minnesota. How did I even get on an email list for a congressman from Utah? The mind boggles.

I usually don't unsubscribe from spammy emails, but like I said, I checked this one out and it was legitimate so I hit the unsubscribe button hoping it would be one of those that includes a window for comments. I was going to ask how I got on the list. Not that I ever would have received an answer, but still, I needed to ask this question even if it shot into the ether. Unfortunately the form had no opportunity for comment. It was merely a check box to unsubscribe followed by a thank you message.

This will remain one of life's great email mysteries.

Spam Attack

Is it just me or has anyone else noticed a huge increase in spam the past few weeks? Even accounts that I never had spam on before are suddenly getting two or three or four spam emails a day. My writing account? Forget about it. Spam is almost out of control.

It made me curious enough to do an internet search and after some browsing, I found an article with graphs showing that spam is at the highest level it's been at since October 2010. This article is from May 2014, so I guess I'm lucky that it took until July for the spam increase to catch up to me. Even so...sigh.

I've also gotten a good look at what kind of attacks have been directed at my website.

Those of you who've been reading my blog for a while might have noticed that I switched back to Blogger. I used to have a WordPress blog attached right to my website, but after it was hacked four or five times, I decided that was enough. I'm very computer savvy, but nothing I tried protected my blog.

I also switched to a new web host around the same time. Not because of the hacking, but because my old host had raised their prices dramatically. My new web host has different programs to look at stats and I was suddenly able to see what kind of assault my site took every month. And by far the vast majority of the attacks were aimed at finding WordPress or one of it's vulnerable plug-ins.

Yikes!

It really makes me glad I ditched WordPress even though I loved the flexibility and features it offered. I'm just sorry that some people out there have to ruin the web experience with spam and hacking attacks.

Adventures In Email

Every now and then I'd get an email from someone with only a link to a website in the body. I knew they hadn't sent it and that their email had been hacked.

I'd also read an article online last summer about a tech reporter who not only had been hacked, he'd had his entire online life taken over. Including having his iPhone erased. One of the suggestions he made was to turn on two-step verification on Gmail, so I did.

Or at least I thought I had.

Last week, someone hacked into my Gmail account. They sent out spam to everyone in my address book, a link to some site that no doubt had malware on it. This was hugely embarrassing and included coworkers, editors, and my agent among others.

I caught it almost immediately. I kept hearing the ping of email arriving and I checked right away, and when I saw all the bounced notes, I knew I'd been hacked. When this happens, the first thing to do is change your password, and I did. The mass emailing was stopped, but not quickly enough to prevent pretty much everyone from getting at least one email.

Why had I gotten hacked? Well, I'd had a tough password on Gmail, but I continually forgot it, so I went with something I could remember and paid the price.

A little further investigation told me that two-step Gmail verification had not been turned on even though I thought I had done it. I rectified that immediately.

Two-step verification sends a code via text to a cell phone. That code is required whenever I sign in from a new location, so in the future, if someone hacks my password, they still won't get in because they won't have verification code.

I also signed up for a password service. It can remember all the passwords for me and I only have to remember one to get into the service. The thing that sold me on this is that it generates secure passwords for me. As soon as I got it, I jumped onto Gmail--all my accounts--and changed all my passwords.

I guess I learned a lesson--never compromise safety--but I just wish these computer geeks would use their powers for good and not evil.

Hacked

Last night, my gmail account was hacked. If you're one of the people who received an email from me, delete it and don't click any links.

Because I'd set up this blog so that I could post via email, one of the spam links made it up here as a post. I deleted it as soon as I realized it had posted, but if you clicked on that link, please run a virus check on your computer. I'm turning the post via email feature off and it shouldn't happen again.

I'm sorry about this.

Email Oops

While I was on deadline for Enemy Embrace, I did something I've never done before, not on any other project. I turned off my email.

Gasp!

I didn't have time to deal with it and it was coming fast and furious in amounts that were mind boggling. It was purely self-defense. I checked it after I finished my project, answered a couple of emails, but I was too tired to deal with the rest. My plan was to get caught up this weekend.

Only that didn't happen. It seems that I got so used to not looking at email that I forgot to check it all weekend. Gak! I even sort of forgot that I had notes to answer. Not completely. There was this nagging sense of something hanging over my head. But by and large, it was out of sight, out of mind.

Then I remembered late Monday evening when I needed to send an email to someone. The sight was not pretty. I might have whimpered.

So I have notes from the weekend, notes from the week I was writing, and notes I didn't answer prior to the week I was off work to write because I didn't have time to take care of it. If you're thinking I have an avalanche of email, you'd be right. I will get caught up. Eventually.

Love-Hate Relationship

Once upon a time, I used to love email. I had Outlook Express setup to download new mail once a minute and I always had it open. Those days are long gone.

Don't get me wrong, I still like email. I hate the phone with the fire of a thousand suns and will do whatever I can to avoid it. Email is a blessing in this regard. It lets me take care of things without having to talk. I'm much better at writing than talking. Especially talking on the phone where there's no facial expression to help me out on the communication front. I just don't love email anymore.

It's not the spam. I actually get very little spam since I went to a contact form on my website. What ended my love affair with email was the sheer volume of it.

Right now, I have 275 emails in my inbox. 275!

Some of them required a response, but got pushed so far down the list as new notes poured in that I forgot they were there. Some of them I kept so that I would take some action on them. Same problem, though. New email pushed them off the radar. Some of them I kept for the information they held. I looked at several that had me scratching my head, trying to figure out why I still had them.

To make things worse, I also get email in on Facebook and even on MySpace. This makes me whimper. I can't keep up with my actual inbox, so please, please don't message me on FB. And if you're an author pushing your book via FB mail, well, you don't want to know what I'm muttering about you. Trust me, it's not "I've got to add him/her to my To Be Bought List."

It all leaves me feeling very overwhelmed.

The articles I've read on taming the email inbox all say only handle an email once. Read it and do what needs to be done with it right away. Sure, like that works. Maybe if this was my day job email this would be doable. But my personal email? Not doable.

There are a couple of issues. First is all the email that comes in overnight. I might have 20 emails in my inbox when I wake up in the morning. There's no way to handle them all before I have to leave for work. I delete what I can, but that still leaves a handful to deal with.

The second problem is that I get a lot of email while I'm at my day job. I skim it quickly on lunch, but again, I don't have time to handle anything then and afternoons/and evenings are busy as I try to get everything done that I need to do.

I've tried different sorting methods for email, but none of them have really tamed the electronic tiger. Then toss in another issue--Outlook Express is no more and I'm using Outlook 2010 now. As soon as I download email into that program, it becomes invisible to me. I don 't know why. I even bought an Outlook 2010 For Dummies book thinking that if I knew the program backward and forward that I would solve this problem. It didn't work.

I'm not saying don't email me. Trust me, if you loved my books and want to tell me how much, your note will be welcomed and much enjoyed.

My Email Woes

Answering email has become a huge problem for me. I haven't been good about it in a while. Okay, a long while, but in the last six months it has gotten much, much worse.

What happened? I bought a new laptop.

Here's the thing. Windows 7 does not have Outlook Express (OE), which is what I've always used. Instead, it's Live Mail or something like that. So I decided that I'd use Outlook. I have Outlook 2003 at the Evil Day Job (EDJ) and it's fine. Some features I like better than OE, some features I like less, but overall it's a wash. I loaded Office 2007 and prepared to transfer my email over to the new laptop.

This wasn't as easy as it sounds. OE uses a different file type than Outlook, so I couldn't simply move everything over. First, I needed to import everything into the Live Mail program. Second, I had to export everything over to Outlook. Aggravating since they're all Microsoft email programs, but only a little time consuming.

And then I discovered I didn't like Outlook 2007 for email.

I don't know why, but for some reason, it's like I don't see the email anymore once it's inside the program. I've tried adjusting things. I know the basics of the program well enough since I use a version of it at the EDJ, but no matter what I changed or how I arranged things, I didn't like it. I still download my email, read it, and forget it's even there. With OE, I used to keep my email program open all the time. With Outlook, I almost never open it and this might be part of the problem I'm having answering email. It's hard to reply when the program is closed.

Clearly, I need to do something about this problem. I remembered there was a website that had old versions of software available to download and I headed over there, hoping to find a version of OE. Only I discovered that OE has never been separate from the computer's operating system, and to get OE, I'd have to download XP and run two systems on my laptop. I don't want to do that.

I thought I'd give Live Mail a try after all. And discovered that to transfer my notes into that program, I'd have to put everything on jump drive, import it on my old laptop to OE, then export those files back to the jump drive, and import them to Live Mail. That seemed like a hell of a lot of work and what if I don't like Live Mail any better than Outlook? If I spent all that time to make the transition and ended up not using it, I wouldn't be happy. Microsoft, why aren't you compatible with yourself???

Next, I thought hey, maybe I can find another free email program. Thunderbird immediately sprang to mind. I'd tried it before and didn't like it, but it must have changed since then and maybe I'd like it now. I didn't.

I checked into other email programs, but after looking at screenshots of the interfaces for multiple programs, I wasn't impressed. Plus, some of the free versions make you have ads. Uh, no. I'm not putting up with ads in my email just to use their program. So I've been stumbling along, the email piling up unanswered inside Outlook 2007.

A couple of weeks ago, I upgraded to Office 2010. My hope was that Outlook 2010 would be more Patti friendly than 2007. It wasn't. In fact, I like it even less than 2007 and that's going some distance.

Do I go through the conversion process to use Live Mail and hope that I like it? There's some question whether I can even convert unless OE is on the same computer, which rules this out. Or do I get out my Office 2003 disk and load Outlook 2003, which I like a lot better than 2007/2010? I'm not sure that Microsoft will let me do this. Or do I try to like Thunderbird? Which might not be possible.

My solution for now is to order Outlook 2010 for Dummies, hoping that if I can configure the program differently, I might remember I have email. I don't know if this will work, but I have to try something. I can't not answer people--that's rude. Anyway, if you're one of the people waiting for email from me, I'm sorry. Really sorry.

Changing Is the Hardest Part

About a year and a half ago, I changed my ISP to get high speed internet. With all the researching I do online and the way I like to have pictures of everything, I was just wasting too much time waiting for pages to pull up on dial up. I hate the cost of high speed, but I was able to justify it by my usage of it as a writing tool. However, at the time I decided to retain my dial up ISP because 1) it would be back up in case my cable connection went down and 2) It would be a pain to change my email addresses everywhere.

I've come to the conclusion, though, that reason 1 is invalid. My cable connection rarely goes down, is never down long, and the two times it was down, I discarded the idea of using my dial up ISP because I couldn't stand the wait times any more.

Reason 2 still stood, but I decided it was ridiculous to pay a monthly fee for something I don't use anymore and haven't used (except for email addresses) in probably a year. This meant it was time to start changing my email addresses and wean away from the old ISP to my newer one. It has been an incredible PITA, beyond what I expected.

First off, I should mention that I had 6 email addresses with my dial up ISP. At the time, I thought it was a good way to stay organized (it wasn't) and I used a couple of them just to email stuff to myself on other computers. I was able to get rid of half those addresses rather easily. The remaining three...sigh.

One email address is the one I used primarily for retailer newsletters and for ordering stuff. I knew this one would be tough because there are retailers online where I used this address, but didn't sign up for newsletters. I was going to have to remember all the places I used it. But I thought it would be simple to change the address for retailers who are sending me newsletters. I was wrong.

At the bottom of most every email is an unsubscribe link. Click it and you're out. Very few of these newsletters have a link marked update your email address. Why not? Why do you make it easier for me to unsubscribe completely rather than just change my address?

So I go to their site and change my email address. That should take care of it, right? Not so much. I've had etailers continue to send me newsletters at my old address long after the period they said it would take to change. I've had them send me newsletters to both addresses long after the period they gave. I go back to make sure I changed the email address, and sure enough, I have.

The newsletter that came in this morning has been from one of the worst ones to deal with. There's a link to update information. I clicked it, updated, and it looked fine. I then unsubscribed from all their newsletters because I didn't want them and wasn't reading them. I thought it was handled, but no. New newsletter was in my inbox this morning. It's been a month, more than enough time to process my changes. I tried to handle it again.

Now I can't log in at the site. My old email address gets an invalid warning, my new email address gets an invalid password warning, and when I try to get it reset, I don't get any email from them. I've tried to click the unsubscribe link, but it tells me an error has occurred and that I should contact their customer service, but before I can click on the link it provides, the screen goes to the home page. What? Give me a chance to click the link! I'm not slow either, but by the time I read the message, the screen was updating.

Then there's the newsletter I want that also had no way to update the email address. I figured I'd unsubscribe and then resubscribe again. Guess what? I can't find any way on their site to subscribe to their newsletter. What are these people thinking?

It's been an ordeal and I haven't even notified most of my friends and acquaintances yet about the email change because I can't get rid of the damn ISP until I can sort out my subscriptions anyway. It makes me wish I'd just used my Gmail address for everything and never gave any retailer my ISP address. It's ridiculous and incredibly difficult to make the switch. What's that slogan? The difficult we do immediately. The impossible takes a little longer. Whoever said this never tried to change email addresses. It's beyond impossible.

Vagina Locked and Loaded

Today I received a spam mail titled Brittany Spears Shoots Down American Spy Satellite With Vagina.  Now I've received some strange spam in my time online, but this gets my vote as weirdest.  No, I didn't open the email to see what it was about--the last thing I need is to trigger a beacon letting them know they have a real live email--but the imagination runs wild.  :-)

Just think of all the Kegel exercises you'd need to do to strengthen those muscles enough to shoot down an orbiting satellite.  I mean seriously, you'd have to do them like 24/7, wouldn't you to get that kind of power?  We're not talking 30,000 feet here; we're talking Earth orbit. And of course, that begs the question of what position does one assume to shoot down a spy satellite in this manner?  On your back?  One leg up?

Can you see the Army enlisting women with these incredible pelvic muscles to launch missiles at terrorist cells?  Or how about shooting down an encroaching asteroid before it can smash into Earth and obliterate all life?  What would the movie Armageddon have been like if they didn't have to go to the asteroid in a space ship?

Okay, it's late and I'm tired enough to attempt to be funny.  Probably not succeeding either, but then I'm not funny--it's my characters who put the humor in my books.

More seriously, who the hell writes these spam mails?  And the bigger question is who the hell is opening them and buying whatever these people are selling?  Because no matter how cheap and easy it is to send spam, if no one is biting, it would stop.  That means someone somewhere is messing up email for the rest of us.  :-/

Oh, I'm a Lumberjack and I'm Okay...

With apologies to Monty Python's Flying Circus, that song title was just too perfect not to use.

I had some fun last night. What falls down must be cleaned up, so there I was with these huge clipper things cutting branches off the downed tree. The trunk that fell is still attached to the tree itself, maybe 15-20 feet up, so we had to be careful not to bring the whole thing down on us as we worked. Anyway, the tree is stripped as high as I could reach with the clippers and what's left will have to be tackled by someone else. My dad ran everything through a chipper so now there's more mulch and I'm not sore this morning.

It's an absolutely beautiful morning here today. The sun is shining, there's a gentle breeze, humidity is low, and temperatures are comfortable. I have the windows open and I'm sitting here thinking, wow, wouldn't it be nice if every day could be like this?

Anyway, I've been trying to stay off the computer when I'm at home. I'm on it so much when I'm writing and I'm on it all day at work, that I feel like I need to make an effort to sever the connection with I'm home. It's gotten tough, though, to keep up with email and with MySpace. How do other people keep up with everything and not spend every waking minute on the computer?

Today, my local chapter meets and I plan to attend. I don't think I've been to a meeting since January because of the book I just turned in. I needed those Saturdays to write--desperately--but I missed getting together with everyone. When I get home, I plan to spend the rest of the day outside. Now that my deck is stained, I can put out my flower boxes and lounge chair, hang my wind spinner, and hopefully, get my bug zapper put together and out, too.

And I'm finding my Polynesian mythology book very interesting. I'm only through the first chapter which covers the history of most of the islands in the Polynesian Triangle, but that was nearly riveting. I'm about 90% sure that my heroine is part Tahitian and that the hero is part Maori, but I didn't get that from reading the book. I suspected it back around the time she first popped into my head, and that sense has become surer over time. I still have no story for the two of them, but I'm itching to know what it is. :-)

Email Hell

Email is making me crazy right now. Let's totally leave Yahoo loop mail out of it because I'm ignoring that. I'm talking about plain, regular email. Over on MySpace, I finally turned on the Away feature on messages because I've got a queue of notes to answer and I have no clue when I'm going to get to them. At least I won't have any new messages to worry about over there which is one step in the right direction.

Then there's my personal email, the stuff coming in directly to me. Yesterday, I received a note from someone I was friendly with when we worked together. She left NWA, and when I tried to send her an Xmas email card, it bounced. Now I have her new email address and a really nice note from her that I'd like to answer. No time. I'm really, really slow at composing email.

Let's not even mention all the notes I have from friends in my inbox. It'll be a miracle if they're all still my friends by the time I get around to replying to them. :-(

Then there are the emails I've had to send. The ones that I get no reply to. These are all important notes--I wouldn't have sent them if they weren't--and I get nada back. This leaves me in a quandary. First, did my email even arrive? Spam filters, the note going astray in cyberspace, whatever. Second, if it did arrive, did they decide to answer it later? Did they decide it required no reply at all? (If so, they were wrong.) Are they on vacation? Is there some other reason why they're not answering? Do I follow up at the risk of sounding like a complete pest? Did they reply and I didn't receive their note? Gah!

I already took time to write the emails once, the last thing I want to do is have to keep following up, but I really, really need answers on a couple of them. I'm starting to obsess and I don't have the energy for this.

I love email. Usually.