Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Frustrated beyond Belief

Email is my life-line. I depend on it for work. It's how my editors communicate with me. I sometimes conduct interviews this way. There is no more important tool for my job.

For various reasons, I like to download my email to a Eudora client. I've tried others. I don't like them so much. I have two subaccounts through my DSL carrier, one for work, one for personal use. Oh, I have other email accounts, set up for blogs and for ordering things online and such. I have a work account that my longest-term clients still use, set up before DSL days and when I wanted a writing-related account separate from my office-job email. I learned a long time ago that my DSL carrier likes to sort my "good" mail to my bulk folder and does so randomly. So I check my work email via Yahoo regularly throughout the day.

On Friday when the husband got home, he seemed annoyed about a question I asked. "Don't you read your email?" Yes, I do, but the email that related to the question wasn't in my in-box. (Still isn't.) Isn't in bulk mail, either. Over the weekend, I got almost no mail. Monday, more mail from the husband didn't arrive, although I did get some very important personal mail. A note from the daughter didn't arrive. This was all on my personal account, which has seemed to have trouble for some time.

Then I noticed the work mail was unusually quiet for a Monday. I sent myself some emails from other accounts. Nothing. I found out later that someone sent me 4 emails that day. Two got through.

I'm expecting emails with interviews, emails about possible jobs, and emails with assignments. Mail seems to be coming in a little better today; I'm assuming there was some glitch with the DSL carrier if this was happening to both accounts that I was checking via Yahoo. I tried the DSL help desk last night. I couldn't make the friendly Indian worker understand that my problem was not in sending mail, but in receiving mail from other Internet domains.

Today I'm trying to do a little damage control, following up on work emails that might have gotten lost in the pipeline (at least one did) and providing an alternate email, just in case.

Like I said, there are reasons I like downloading my mail to Eudora and keeping with the email account I have now. It was mentioned that I use gmail, but the most important feature of any email client doesn't seem to be available on gmail. I need to filter my mail to mailboxes to keep everything separate. If there is a secret to that on gmail, please let me know.

If I sound a little stressed, I am. When my email goes wonky, it affects my whole career.

3 comments:

Patti said...

"wonky"....this word made me laugh. how sad am i?!

Marijke Vroomen-Durning said...

Sue, you can put labels to sort your emails. I use gmail exclusively now and each client has their own folder where the email is directly sent.

Alien Truther said...

The other nice thing about the labels in Gmail is that you can have multiple labels on each email. This means that an email can be cross-referenced by any of the labels you put on it. Google's web site has a tip on how to use them.