To E-mail or Not To E-mail

As the summer vacation season comes to a close, I've decided to pose a question to my blogging audience.....

"While on vacation, do you check e-mail or not?...if so, do you do that freely or are you compelled to do so because of your job?"

I took my vacation in August and was gone just a week from work. I am very tethered to my work e-mail as I can log in from home 24 hours a day just as if I'm sitting in my office. But, when I go on vacation, I just don't want to keep my computer as an appendage. When I returned to work from my vaction, I had over 300 e-mails to sort through, not to mention the ones that were automatically sorted for me, thanks to the Outlook Rules I have set. Granted, some of those 300 e-mails weren't important or easily deleted, but the mere fact that I had to go through them was time-consuming. Then, add to that my personal e-mail accounts I had to check and I'd guess I sorted through 500 or more messages by the time I finished. In fact, I had an e-mail request from a friend on LinkedIn that I just found yesterday that was overlooked in my shuffling of vacation e-mail.

I've polled some of my co-workers and it's a mixed bag of responses. Some prefer to take 15 minutes a day while on vacation to check e-mail, put out fires, and have peace of mind. Others prefer not to touch it at all and just enjoy their time away (that would be me). Still others have mobile devices that make it easy for them to check e-mail while on the go. And, there are a few who end up in locations where internet access is difficult to obtain. Although, one of my co-workers went to Fiji and was able to check e-mail at least once a day. There is just something non-relaxing about that, I think.

So, what do you do? And is what you do what you prefer or just a compulsory task brought on by the never-ending flow of information that trickles down our computer screen?

Discuss.

Check Your Spam Folder

E-mail has become as common as picking up the phone to dial (or push buttons.) But whenever something is in widespread use, there are always culprits trying to mess with a good thing. First the telephone was invented, then you started getting obscene and prank phone calls. Eventually Caller ID was born to help avoid answering an unidentifiable call.

The same holds true for e-mail. People around the globe feel it necessary to send you alerts about some two cent stock that will hit the charts the next day, or inform you how cheap you can buy prescription drugs online. Or worse to spread computer viruses through various means via e-mail. To combat that problem, many e-mail providers have developed this lovely little folder called "Spam" - the name given to undesirable or unsolicited e-mail sent in bulk. There was even legislation passed - the CAN-SPAM Act - to control the actions of guilty parties. So, everyone raise their hands in praise, no more Spam!

Yeah, right.

Solving this problem seemed easy, right? Just set up some rules and allow all the spammy mail to land in a designated "Spam" or "Junk" folder. Wrong. Oh yeah, it captures a good number of these nastygrams, but many a good e-mail gets sucked up in these folders. I've had some recent issues with my BellSouth e-mail (I have 4 e-mail addresses to manage all my communication) Evidently BellSouth has had some culprits issuing spam from their domain name, causing all bellsouth.net e-mails to get blacklisted from some e-mail servers. If I've had this conversation once, I've had it five times in the last week:

Me: "Did you get my e-mail?"
Them: "No"
Me: "Did you check your spam or junk folder?"
Them: "No"
Me: "Well, do that because it's probably there."

For all you non-techhies out there that just empty those folders without a quick scan, here's some food for thought. Let's say you were getting a lot of visitors at your home that were a little sketchy. To avoid having to open the door everytime someone arrived, you rigged a robot to stand at your door and determine who is legit and who isn't. Chances are some of your best friends might get turned away. Robot failed.

Well, that's the methodology behind Spam and Junk folders. They are trying to determine automatically and technologically, what is and isn't spam. Chances are those directions to this weekend's party got sucked away into SpamLand simply because it was sent to multiple addresses. The moral of the story? Check your spam folder...