Email Snafu Casualties

[marcusmarcusrc]

I believe that my alum.mit.edu address may have stopped forwarding as long as a month ago. Things that I now know that I missed (and some things that make more sense in hindsight)

Not getting an email from a listserve about an Ernie Moniz talk at AAAS (found out about it 2 hours beforehand, snuck in without RSVP'ing: this was the one that tipped me off, though I was thinking that maybe I had just overlooked the email because I've been busy)

Not getting a notice about overdue books (this happened before, as a library snafu, so I just chalked it up to that)

Not getting an auto-confirmation from Delta about a ticket acquired with frequent flyer miles: I manually had it email me the itinerary later, when I couldn't find the confirmation in my inbox (and now I know why I couldn't)

Not getting an email from an MIT colleague asking some questions about code I'd written. She's a facebook friend, so emailed me again when I posted about the snafu there. She'd assumed I had been on vacation or something.

Not getting an email from an MIT friend who was going to be in town this Sunday and wanted to get together (and just resent the mail after hearing from me about the email problems)

That's all I know about so far. I'm a little nervous that I may have missed something important (one of the journals that I have a paper in review at has my @alum address): also I don't like the fact that not only did I not get the email, but apparently in the two personal email cases I know about they didn't bounce back to the sender either. Fortunately, most people seem to directly email my @mit.edu address (or my EPA address, or my gmail address, or...)

Comments

[nuclearpolymer.livejournal.com]

Dunno about you, but I get these alum spam summaries pretty frequently. I don't check them, but I guess if I stopped getting them, that might be a signal that something is happening.

[marcusmarcusrc.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I should have realized that I was getting only 1 spam summary at a time, rather than two. (since I get one from alum, and one from mit)

[marcusmarcusrc.livejournal.com]

Really, in hindsight, there were plenty of signals I could have caught much earlier. This is one of those times when I realize what a problem multi-tasking and overload are: it is easy to miss details that would be have been obvious had I been more more relaxed.

Sort of like major scientific discoveries: you not only need to notice something weird happen, you have to be paying attention so that when you notice the weird thing, you actually stop and try and figure it out, rather than just assuming "oh, the bacteria in that plate died. Weird. Well, time to get back to my experiment" and throw out penicillin...