Why is it that some simple computer tasks can develop into a real nightmare! Last week I discovered that some of the Emails that people were sending to me were being returned as “User Unknown”, others ended up somewhere in cyberspace and a lot of others were being delivered to my Inbox. Recently on average I’ve been receiving 20 – 30 Emails per day (not including SPAM) which seemed about normal. When I’m home I try to answer most of them immediately or at worst within a week. So I was quite shocked to find out from one person that they had sent me 4 Emails over the last 2 months and I hadn’t received even one of them.
I contacted my Internet service provider and at first they didn’t think there was a problem – Well isn’t that a surprise! After insisting that there was a problem, they agreed to move my Email account to a different server. All I had to do was change the settings in Outlook to the new Incoming and Outgoing mail names. Seems simple enough, after all I’ve set up many Email accounts in the past. That wasn’t to be the case this time, now I wasn’t receiving any Emails nor could I send any. Fortunately I have another service provider so I could send and receive Emails on that account. The short version of this story, is that after a dozen Emails, Live Chat and 3 phone calls, my Email is finally working and suffice it to say I hadn’t made a mistake. When I launched Outlook and everything was working properly, I immediately received 683 Emails, but the 4 from the person who had alerted me to the problem weren’t there. I have no idea how many others are off in cyberspace, probably killed off by now by some filtering system somewhere. Of the ones that I did receive the oldest was from over a year, February, 2008. All I can say, is that there must be a lot of people out there that must think I’m a pretty rude (fill in the blank) person for not answering their Email. Over the next couple of weeks I’ll try to answer the ones that I’ve just received.
So if you’ve written to me in the past year and haven’t heard back, that’s why.
