How to complicate your life

A long time ago, I opened my first email account with an internet provider who I stayed with for about 4 years. Just one email account. What riches. What bounty! And then I moved to highspeed internet with Mediaone. They gave me several email addresses. And then they were bought out by AT&T which meant another change of email addresses. Then AT&T was bought out by Comcast, which meant all new email addresses, in addition to the AT&T ones that still aren’t turned off. (I think they will be at the end of this month.) So, over the course of years and the accumulation of email addresses and using them for official stuff and email notices from various interests and a couple of mailing lists, plus an entire body of communication from a family I don’t know, but who added my AT&T address to their family correspondence in error (and they are amazingly prolific writers!) and then added my Comcast address to their address books when I wrote to tell them I have no idea who they are in principle, but I’m really getting to know the intimate details of their lives through email, I get a lot of email directed to several different addresses.

Now lets add a couple of domains and a blog or two. And, well, heck, how about a couple of gmail accounts while we’re at it.

I really love gmail. But because it runs with cookies and because I have a gmail account for the previous blog and one for this blog, I have to keep two different browsers open to access my gmail. And when I’m running a few different programs, it’s enough of an extra drain on my computer’s memory that can cause everything to suddenly quit. Nevertheless, over the course of months, I had ALL my mail accounts forwarded to gmail. With something like 70 different filters. Plus, of course, using the gmail accounts for for blog communications that required additional filters and a whole lot of political mailings and notifications with yet more filters.

A week or so ago, I decided to start using Mozilla’s Thunderbird email program. And it’s wonderful. I really like it. It seemed like a good idea, now that Gmail does POP mail, to just forward all the gmail to Thunderbird and leave copies of everything at Gmail. The idea being...if I needed to find anything quickly, it would be a snap to simply use gmail’s search feature. Again, I set up a load of filters, this time for Thunderbird.

So, at the pinnacle of silly, I have mail being forwarded to Gmail and then forwarded back to Thunderbird. At least until I sort the whole mess out.

Trouble is when I started forwarding the Gmail to Thunderbird, I didn’t choose the correct settings. When it forwarded to Thunderbird mail wasn’t saved at Gmail. It was forwarded with no copy left behind.

Meanwhile I filtered a lot of duplicate mail coming into Thunderbird right into the trash, knowing that if I screwed it up, I’d have copies back at Gmail. Well, surprise. I don’t.

The point of the story is....I’ve deleted a lot of email in Thunderbird and I don’t have copies at Gmail. If you have sent mail to me at a gmail address in the last week and I haven’t responded, that means it’s gone. I know some of you did.

Meanwhile, I have a heck of a mess going on and I still haven’t figured out a good way to make it simple again. Well, I know one solution, but I use all those email addresses!

As of yesterday, all gmail is both being saved and forwarded. That’s one big step in the right direction, anyway.