This has been a week of really bad e-mail experiences. Mostly it has to do with all the badness out there in cyberspace. The scum and villainy out there really gets me down.
I mean e-mail is a huge part of my business. In fact, E-mail is almost the entire reason we were able to move here and operate our business from the hinterlands. I have clients and contacts all over the world. So when all my e-mail started bouncing back to me yesterday, it was bad.
Plus, James just wrote an extremely cool enhancement to the Logical Web Publisher content management system that runs all our sites (including Logical Tips). Now people can send feedback on any article. He also added a built-in contact form. Unfortunately, while we were testing it, unbeknownst to us, our mail server apparently had this sending problem. So he’s busy digging into code, unable to figure out what could be wrong.
Of course, the problem wasn’t his programming code. After all my e-mail was returned to me, it became obvious that the problems he had with the new software didn’t have much to do with the software. It had a lot more to do with the problems on the mail server.
The problems on the mail server were due to much larger problems all over the Internet. The latest in a series of worms exploited some hole in a whole bunch of servers and hosed up everything. It seems like this happens about once a year.
Then, for my first feedback using our cool new forms, I get an incredibly rude e-mail that said the person hated my site. In fact, it was so rude, I think it might have been some person hired to fill out forms to see if they lead to real e-mail addresses. Yet another horrid way to use the Internet: make someone feel bad first, then if they reply, make them feel worse because they’ve been added to every slime mailing list in cyberspace.
Anyway, it’s days like this when I think that we may need to cease our three e-mail newsletters. Many people have switched to getting them through the RSS feed anyway. If more people start using RSS, this e-mail version of Logical Tips may just go away.
So hey, enjoy it while it lasts. Clearly, I need a vacation.