That was the question I faced when my wife and I prepared for our vacation trip to England. Because we would be gone for three weeks, I wanted a way to deal with my multiple e-mail accounts and prevent crucial e-mail from piling up in my mailboxes. And because my wife, Diana DeMuth, is Membership Director, she needed a way to access her mail so potential new members got prompt responses.
A couple months ago, our President Milt Hull sent me two articles just before he left on vacation. The articles had several high-resolution graphics, and one file came to over six megabytes. My allowed mail space at Quiknet, my local ISP, is only five MB, so the mail bounced with a message saying my mail box was full. Unfortunately, that message went to Milt, who was on vacation, instead of to me, who was patiently waiting for our President to send his articles. When I finally asked Milt about the articles, we discovered the problem.
I wanted to anticipate any potential problems, so I arranged for all my mail to go to two locations: USA.Net (Net@ddress.com) and Quiknet. At both locations I can retrieve the mail over the Internet, so I could theoretically monitor my e-mail from anywhere, as long as I could find a computer. Then I set up auto-responders, to automatically send a message to e-mail correspondents saying I was on vacation and would answer their mail as soon as possible.
The next step was to head for the Internet, where I logged on to www.google.com (my favorite search engine), and looked for "Internet cafes England." Literally within seconds I had several lists of places across England where I could rent computers connected to the Internet, complete with their addresses, phone numbers, price schedules, hours, and even their menus in some cases. This will be a cinch, I figured. You can see this coming already, can't you?
The Membership Director checks her e-mail with an I-Mac! |
Cut to England, a few days later. Skip over the embarrassing part about learning to drive all over again. Bath, it turns out, has several Internet cafes. We found one, and although it seemed to have mostly Macintosh computers, we quickly logged in and start checking e-mail. Connecting went smoothly, although my USA.Net mailbox was stuffed with hundreds of messages from listservers that I subscribe to.
Despite that, everything worked well. My QuikNet inbox was slow to come up, but did, so I was able to work on it. Part way through, something went wrong and when I tried to log in again, I got an error message saying the box might be in use. I put it down to the mailbox not being closed properly, and figured I would be able to open it again the next time I tried.
A few days later we were in xxx, and found another café to check mail again. USA.Net still worked fine but QuikNet balked again. Over and over I got an error message that looked like something timed out-but at the server end of the transaction, not at my end.
This held true throughout the three-week trip. USA.Net worked fine, but QuikNet was inaccessible, and every time it looked like a time-out error. I sent e-mail to everyone I could think of who e-mailed me at that address, letting them know I couldn't get their mail and asking them to send it instead to tom@etoma.com, the address linked to my Web site. Then I had to contact my site host and have them re-route the mail to USA.Net, because I have a POP server but not a Web interface at the site.
In the end, I had to do a lot of scrambling to get everything working right once I actually tried handling my e-mail in England, but most of the problems could have been avoided. When I got home and checked my QuikNet mail from a local connection, I discovered more than 1,000 messages from the auto-responder at the SPCUG announcement listserver. It seems I got an announcement from the SPCUG announcement listserver, and my auto-responder sent back a message saying I'd reply as soon as I could.
The listserver doesn't allow incoming messages, so it sent me a note that I was trying to mail to a listserver. When that got to my e-mail account, it generated a reply saying I was on vacation and would reply as soon as I could. When that reached the listserver, it sent out a reply saying I was trying to mail to a listserver. This went on and on, back and forth, until I had over 1,000 messages in my mailbox. And, somehow, I had duplicates of the entire thing-all 1,000+ messages-in my NetZero mailbox as well. No wonder I couldn't bring up my mailbox over the Web-just loading the headers would take forever.
I quickly went to the QuikNet site to turn off the auto-responder, mumbling under my breath about the idiocy of the person who designed it. As I cancelled the auto-responder, I spotted a notice above it that said, "If you subscribe to a listserv, you probably don't want an auto-responder." Hmph. Why don't they put that notice where people could see it?
If I'd realized the problems, I would have routed all my personal e-mail to one address, which could then have an auto-responder linked to it. And mail from listservers could then accumulate somewhere else undisturbed. Of course, that would have required a lot more preparatory work identifying which mail was coming from where.
But it occurs to me that lists could be a lot easier to manage, too. It should be easy to go to www.topica.com, which hosts the SPCUG list along with a number of others to which I subscribe, and check a box that says "Vacation Hold," and fill in dates. You could choose to have the list mailings held for your return, or just turned off completely while you're gone. That would be a user-friendly solution to what must be a common problem.
