The Problem With Email

For the last five days or so, I've been having trouble with AOL's webmail, the email client I use to avoid booting the AOL software. There are two versions of it, both of which load inside my Firefox browser, both of which are buggy. The new interface on the bells and whistles version now offers backgrounds, and I have mine set as a starfield, which is nice. You know what would be nicer? Being able to open my email!

I mean it. There have been many emails lately that I click on, only to get one of several error messages. The email is "not found" or "can't be opened," or an unspecified error occurs that causes the whole client to reboot. Usually this happens with emails I actually need to open, as opposed to the automated junk. This is email from friends, or the next Auditing assignment, or the church bulletin for me to adapt announcements from to post to the church's news blog.

There are also minor problems, such as not being able to place photos in the email in one version of the email client, and no ready means to insert or remove hyperlinks. There isn't even a button or menu item or key command for the latter. How backward is that? I have to create the formatted text elsewhere, and then paste it in.

Sunday I had several important-looking emails, none of which I could open. In desperation, I did something I hadn't done since sometime last year: I opened Windows Mail, the Vista equivalent of Outlook. After the obligatory error messages I get there too, the software set about catching up on many months' worth of email from AOL. It took about an hour, but at least I was able to read my mail at the end of it.

Now, I've ranted this rant before, I'm sure. And I know there are alternatives. People seem to like Gmail, and after all I've already got significant ties with Google due to my blogs and webmaster tools and the fact that I prefer it for search. I also already have email on mavarin.com, which is hosted by Yahoo. But that one has other annoyances, mainly the huge daily influx of the most egregious forms of spam, some of which escape the spam filter. And I've had AOL as my email address since 1992 or early 1993, first with kfbofpql and later ignoring that in favor of the mavarin screen name. Despite my many issues with AOL, I find it difficult to sever this last link, especially as it means changing my email address with banks and bills and friends and other websites.

But I think, maybe, I'm just about fed up enough to do it.

Karen

Clearing the Decks

Tonight, as I waited for my brain to come up with an angle for this blog entry, I

• watched the unaired version of the pilot for Doctor Who ("An Unearthly Child"), again,
• did the dishes,
• collected the recycling in one place,
• put the Halloween stuff away,
• did laundry,
• separated my old laundry from John's and folded them both, and
• cleared out over 300 emails from my main account's in box.
  

The things some people will do to put off writing!

Seriously, though, it was all stuff that needed doing. The laundry and the dishes were no big deal; I normally do dishes every night around 4 AM, and the laundry as needed. The Halloween stuff was starting to get on John's nerves, but again, no big deal. It was already back in the plastic cauldron and the big black box with the orange lid.

Sorting the neglected, overflowing basket of clean clothes was definitely an overdue task, though, and so, clearly, was the backlog of email. I deleted a selection of the political mailing list ones, read and unread, and filed many of the rest. Old Writer's Digest alerts about new magazines I'll never write for (Peanut Butter Today, Arkansas Traveler, Gerbil World) also got the heave-ho, along with old church emails that consisted of the week's church bulletin (to mine for online announcements) and a few words to the effect that I should have a good weekend. And then there were a bunch of social networking alerts, for which I needed to sort the strangers with genuine common interests from the more spammish followers and "fans." Dog lover? Sure. Politics? Probably. How to make money on real estate foreclosures? Forget it.

The unread email count is down to 91, and I'm pretty sure it was over 400 at some point this weekend. And that doesn't include all the stuff I'd read but not deleted or filed. I have a bad habit of keeping almost every email I get, so tonight's mass deletion represents major progress in more ways than one.

The First Doctor (1963-1966)

I mentioned Doctor Who above, and you probably don't think that a report that I watched my favorite tv show really fits in with the list of chores I did overnight. In that sense, you're right. It's not exactly a chore. But in a way it's like the email, and the basket of clean laundry. I'm trying to clear the decks, disposing of another kind of backlog so I can move on. See, for years we've been trying to collect as many of the Doctor Who serials (and individual episodes) as possible, in part so that I can watch all the extant stuff in order. Even though the BBC foolishly threw away their masters of some episodes before the advent of commercial video, there's still a lot of it to be had. The show started airing in Great Britain the day after JFK was shot, back in November 1963, and ran (with one 18-month "rest") for 26 seasons ending in 1989. Then there was the tv movie in 1996, and another long wait before the show returned, bigger than ever, in 2005. Most of the series still exists in some form, or has been recreated from old photos and soundtracks and even newly-produced linking material.

(I should explain, for anyone who doesn't already know, that the British science fiction series Doctor Who is about an alien time traveler known only as the Doctor. This clever, witty, usually non-violent hero has the ability to regenerate rather than die outright when badly ill or injured, resulting in a new face and a slight change in personality. In practical terms, that means the show can go on for decade after decade, periodically replacing the lead actor. Fans traditionally refer to each incarnation by number. Thus, William Hartnell played the First Doctor long ago, and David Tennant is toward the end of his tenure as the Tenth Doctor.)

...is far less appealing than the Tenth Doctor (2005-2009)

In 2009 Doctor Who is airing as a handful of specials, not a full season, so this seems like a good time to unleash that plan of watching many hundreds of hours of pre-revival Doctor Who over a period or months, possibly years, in airdate order. But there's a problem. Although I was a fan of the series as far back as 1989 or so, and really enjoyed stories by the Third, Fourth, Fifth and Seventh Doctors, I'm afraid I don't like those early stories about the First Doctor very much. When I set out to watch the show in order, I tend to get bogged down, early in the First Doctor's first season. Then I got off and watch the recent stuff, and try again months later. Rather than figuring out where I left off, I usually take it from the top. again. Thus, I'm back to An Unearthly Child.

It's silly, I know. Nobody cares but me what episodes I watch in what order, as long as I do the dishes and the laundry. But this is me being stubborn. I want to get a sense of the grand saga of it all, the forty-five year character arc of the grumpy, elderly, duplicitous antihero who eventually becomes the outwardly youthful, usually cheerful, wandering hero with an undercurrent of loss and loneliness. Maybe this time I'll pull it off, working my way past Planet of Giants and The Romans to get to the more engaging adventures of the later Doctors.

On the other hand, I'm sure John would much prefer that I spend those hundreds of hours sorting through boxes and getting rid of stuff. Well, maybe I can do both, clearing decades of junk out of the house while making my way through decades of television history.

Or not. We'll see how far I get this time, with either project.

Karen

Fighting the Smears, One Email at a Time

Reposted from my Obama blog, which just got its first comment. Yay! With a few tweaks for the Outpost readership:

Fighting the Smears, One Email at a Time

By Karen Funk Blocher - Sep 22nd, 2008 at 2:22 am EDT

Does this happen to you?

I have this friend - well, more of an acquaintance, really, but at least a borderline friend. (Put it this way: she's got my last name wrong in her address book.) We met at work, before the company we both worked for collapsed in the mortgage crisis. She's the sort of person who likes to forward the Joke of the Day, chain letters involving prayers or pictures of flowers or kitties, virtual hugs - you know the drill.

And political claptrap.

Most of the rumors on the Fight the Smears page, I recognize from F.'s email forwards. She's also sent a few that haven't even hit Snopes, let alone the Smears page. One or two of the major smears she's sent on more than once, even after I sent her back the debunking, with the link to the relevant Snopes page. It's as if she accepts forwards completely uncritically and passes them on, but ignores what is said firsthand by someone she actually knows. Or maybe she accepts whatever fits the worldview that has somehow been inculcated in her, and ignores whatever doesn't.

For over a year I've been deleting most of F.'s forwards unread, the jokes and virtual hugs and cutesy graphics. I don't want to offend her and hurt her feelings by asking her to stop sending them. It's only the ones whose subject headers seem to indicate allegedly factual content that I even bother to open. If indeed an email contains some kind of wild claim(s), I then Snopes the darn thing and send back the result, along with a plea that she think about what she's reading and do at least minimal research before she forwards this junk. (I do this with any factually challenged email forward, no matter who sends it.)

I never, ever see a forwarded retraction. I almost never hear back at all. All I get is mailer daemons from a few addresses if I dare to "reply all."

And now I see that there are right-wing rumblings accusing Snopes of pro-Obama bias. Funnily enough, I've also heard at least one person bitterly accuse Snopes of right-wing bias.

A week or two ago, I took my Snopes-based reply tactic a step further. Rather than burden the other recipients of one of these junk emails (this one implied that Obama was the Antichrist), I sent my debunk and my plea for critical thinking to every person listed in the subject headers as having actually forwarded the thing, as far back as the headers went. I think there were literally six degrees of separation between me and the first sender listed. At least I would be reaching some of the people who were actually spreading the lies around, even if they didn't heed me. As usual, there was no reply. Except...about a week later, I got an email directly from (I think) the first person listed on the older forward, linking to an alleged (and of course totally bogus) Obama sex video. This is actually a virus, so presumably this Obama hater now has an infected computer, unless of course she acted on my email warning her of this. Schadenfreude, anyone? How about some Schadenfreude Pie?

Yesterday, F. sent me two new email forwards. One was a relatively sane but logically flawed attack on Obama as an employer. The other tried to blame all our economic woes on those darn immigrants.

"Fwd: FW: Obama practices gender pay inequity in his Senate Office" uses carefully documented but misleadingly applied statistics to "prove" that Senator Obama as an employer doesn't practice what he preaches on equal pay for equal work, using the fact that many of his top advisers are male to show gender inequity. This leaves out the "for equal work" part of the equation, folks. If a President McCain made more than a VP Palin (and let's make sure this never happens), would that be gender inequity? Heck, no. That would be a pay scale based on the job positions, not on who fills them.

Similarly, if you have, let's say, seven top-paid advisers and only three of them are women, that proves you're a sexist hypocrite, right? Um, actually, no. Nothing short of a strict quota system would ensure that at least 50% of employees at every pay level lack a Y chromosome, regardless of other qualifications. (Good luck getting three and a half women among the seven execs!) Otherwise, there will always be the possibility that the right person for a given executive job might actually be a man, in more than half of the cases. This is especially true in a relatively small staff, where there aren't hundreds or thousands of employees to make the sample statistically significant, and even out probability. McCain's laudable record on pay scales among his staff shows that he doesn't exclude women from consideration for top posts, and that's a good thing. But his numbers are no more statistically significant than Obama's, and do not prove superiority in his policy or practices toward equal pay for equal work.

The sane and reasonable alternative to strict quotas that ignore qualifications is to choose the best person for the job regardless of gender, and not adjust the salary based on whether the successful candidate is male or female. And if Mr. Jones and Ms. Smith are both hired on a given date to answer phones or screw in a light bulb, they should earn the same wage, and get raises based on identical criteria. That's what "equal pay for equal work" means. Give equally-qualified women and men the same shot at the same job for the same pay, whether as CEO or dogcatcher, and watch the glass ceiling shatter.

The other recent email tries to prove that "$ 338.3 BILLION DOLLARS A YEAR" is spent on illegal aliens in this country, directly or indirectly, based on benefits, education, law enforcement, remittances to other countries and ill-defined lost wages for Americans; and that these costs, not Iraq or Wall Street, outsourcing or the mortgage meltdown, are "what's bankrupting us." I passed that one on to Snopes, because they have nothing like it yet. My gut reaction is that most of the statistics are likely to be news reports featuring people who spout distorted or made-up numbers. Also, it's a logical fallacy to say that if A is a drain on the economy, the unrelated factors B and C must be irrelevant to it, particularly if you don't research the numbers for B and C.

This weekend, I decided to risk F.'s annoyance with a new tactic. I sent her an email forward of my own:

Hey F. --

Instead of just forwarding anti-Obama emails that try to scare people on the basis of ethnicity and logical fallacies, creative use of statistics or outright lies, none of which have anything to do with the issues, why not listen to what he actually has to say about the most important issues?

(Canned text follows)

This week, the economic troubles that have long been simmering on Main Street boiled over to Wall Street, putting our entire economy in danger.

Barack Obama laid out a plan to address this crisis and offered strong, practical solutions for American families.

The Obama team put together a short video that speaks to these problems and describes Barack's plan.

Watch the video now:

http://my.barackobama.com/economicplan

Thanks

***

Karen again: from now on, every time I receive an anti-Obama email from you, I will counter it with factual information on what he actually stands for. You deserve to know the truth!

Karen

And I just adapted this entry as a reply to the equal pay email, and sent it to the three people who forwarded that one.

Will F. read the emails? Will she watch the video? Will it inspire a change in attitude, or just get me kicked off her email forwarding list, which would be more relief than punishment? Stay tuned. Based on my experience to date, it's more than likely that nothing will change.

Karen

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The Sins of the Emails

Mind you, I'm more sinning than sinned against when it comes to email. On my main account, the one with that funny M word at AOL, I don't really get much really unsolicited email that doesn't hit my spam folder. But just the AOL Alerts, Blogger comment alerts, Writer's Market emails, and job alerts from CareerBuilder and other sites are enough to fill my in box fairly quickly. If I don't feel like facing up to certain categories of email, things tend to build up until they're truly out of hand. I remember how guilty I felt the first time my in box topped 100 items.

Tonight I cleared out nearly 400 items.

No, really. I remember having 406 for sure, but I think my starting point was 426. At this moment I am down to 30 emails. It took hours and hours, partly because my cable modem was acting much like a dialup over a bad phone line in a thunderstorm. All too often, Firefox failed to find the server. But I got stubborn, and kept plugging away at the task anyway. Now I need to rush this entry and go to bed.

So what's left? A big chunk of it is advertising, from movie sites and Walgreens and Papa John. And that's just the stuff I didn't delete or file. The second major category is the job placement stuff. The third is email from church, mostly announcements and such, including a bunch that I never got around to posting on the church news blog. Mea culpa. And I still owe replies to a handful of real people on a variety of subjects, one of them in response to an email I never even got to read. Last night the mail client gave me an error message when I tried to open it. Tonight the email disappeared entirely, probably accidentally deleted by me, through my most grievous fault.

The thing that set off tis email purging project, aside from the comment alerts, was the need to isolate the job alerts and start going through them, eliminating the junk and outdated ones so I can look at the rest properly. Tomorrow I'll start looking at the actual job listings, and update my resume again, for the third time in month or so. I've been a total slacker about it, but now I've got to get serious.

Why? I was laid off today. My last day with my current employer is May 23rd.

Karen

Much Better, Thanks

I've told this story before, although it's not really mine to tell. A friend of mine, Robin, used to work at a major talent / music /literary agency in L.A., and would occasionally run into stars in the hallway. One day, distracted with whatever he was about to do, he greeted Harry Belafonte with a hurried (but polite) "Hi, how are you?"

Robin's words were meant to be rhetorical, but Belafonte's reply was phrased oddly enough to get Robin's attention: "How are you feeling?"

"Much better, thanks," Robin said, and rushed off down the hall.

Tuffy this evening, her damaged tongue showing

Well, I'm delighted to say tonight that Tuffy is much better, thanks. She greeted me at the door tonight as usual, and ate a bunch of the watered down canned dog food, and seemed happy to be petted and scratched. It's clear that her tongue still hurts - she's mostly drinking her food rather than eating it - but she's definitely more chipper tonight, and I was able to get her pills inside her. Hooray!

Tuffy of the lopsided tongue.

Supposedly we'll be able to tell that the tongue isn't quite straight, but frankly I'd rather not look!




I got a couple neat photos tonight, shortly before and shortly after sunset, but not really during. The cloud photo above is not lightened or darkened or saturated in any way. The dusk photo is lightened a bit, but that's all.

The novel editing and any short story I might attempt will have to wait for another day, but I did accomplish something tonight. Tae - The AOL Mail Blog Guy left a comment on one of my recent entries, assuring me that AOL mail can be accessed and saved through a number of mail client programs. He mentioned POP3 and IMAP protocols, but not specifically how to set them up. Good enough, though: based on that hint, my Google search box suggested the appropriate search terms with very little prompting. It took me a few tries to get the account set up correctly, but the key info was found on someone's unofficial FAQ about it:

The AOL IMAP and SMTP server addresses are:

• imap.aol.com (port 143)
• smtp.aol.com (port 587)

I spent a few hours sorting my mail into a bunch of "Saved Mail" subfolders, reading long-neglected letters and deleting the useless or outdated stuff. It's looking much better now! One neat thing about it is that Windows Mail, which is the Vista equivalent of Outlook Express, apparently talks back to the AOL servers about what's being read and deleted and saved. The AOL Webmail suddenly has the same folders I set up in the other program! Neat!

Karen

Back Burners

I'm backed up tonight. I owe emails to several of you, an overdue birthday gift to my own brother, and another one to a friend whose birthday started a couple of hours ago. I have new fiction files from two friends to read, and I must, must, must sleep, and I mean in the next five minutes if possible.

A friend mentioned in an email today (one of the ones to whom I owe replies!) that logging in to comment here hasn't been working for her this week. Is anyone else having trouble with this? If you do, please feel free to email me. Then you, too, can be on my list of people to whom I owe emails! Seriously, though, I suspect it has something to do with the changeover to Google accounts (with for example @aol.com or @gmail.com at the end rather than a naked login name), but I'm just guessing. If you're still using the old style login, that may be the problem.

I did write a little piece of the follow-up to the fire scene tonight, and read another scene from my friend's novel, and did a little work on chapters Two and Eight of An Adept in Mâvarin, the first volume of Mages. I'll get to the emails tomorrow, I hope, and if Scalzi picked something good, I'll have a nice Weekend Assignment entry for you. But for tonight, here's some photo or other, and enough words so I can say that I posted. Good night!

35 and Counting

No, that's not a joking reference to my age. I'll be 50 in March, and I'm fine with that. No, that's the current count of unread emails on this screen name. At one point last week it was 165. When this entry posts it will be 36.

Mostly over the last few days I've caught up the AOL Alerts, deleted all the "Today in the Tucson Citizen" alerts (and unsubscribed from same), mucked about with my LiveJournal Friends list, and gone through one, count 'em, one, FeedBlitz alert. That last isn't as hopeless as it sounds. I used it as a means to unsubscribe from two feeds - one from someone I doubt has ever visited Outpost, and one BlogSpot mirror of an AOL Journal I read on the AOL side. (Hi, Pat!) I also went through every Making Light entry in the past 25 days or so, continuing a few conversations long after everyone else had left the party. The one whose threaded comments had me laughing so hard I couldn't breathe was basically a collection of silly or out-of-context disclaimers. I added a few of my own at the end, including this one from a bowl I've been using in the microwave oven for years: "May become hot in microwave." Almost as much fun, for those of us who aren't overly fond of GWB's Presidency, is this collection of bumper sticker slogans. I particularly liked the subtle reference to a Doctor Who Christmas special, although it's a slight misquote.

You want me to do what? Forget it! Hands off!

Unfortunately, just doing that much (and deleting a few miscellaneous emails unread) took all evening, and I haven't even gotten to the Round Robin blog yet to RSVP - first time in a year and a half I haven't done so right away. Let's rectify that right now. Ooh...good one! The next Round Robin topic is "Magic"! You know that's right up my alley. Not so much rabbits and hats and three card monte and swords through beautiful assistants - not that there's anything wrong with that! - but The Magic of Mâvarin, and perhaps also the magic of photographic trickery. Yeah, this is going to be a fun one, I think! Be sure to RSVP if you'd like to play along.

"But that trick never works!"

Time to go. Catch you tomorrow!

Karen

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