Flailing helplessly as he sinks beneath the electronic waves

[jducoeur]

Oh, right. Until about 24 hours ago, I'd forgotten the real problem of having our desktop machine down. You see, we have our Thunderbird email reader very carefully configured, with lots of filters and lots of folders. What this means, in practice, is that the East Kingdom mailing list gets automatically stuffed away into its own folder, where I don't have to deal with it unless I really want to.

Yes, I've been online for many years, and I'm no stranger to volume. But *oy* the past day has sucked from an email POV. Not only has the EK list utterly exploded, the Society-level Laurel and Pelican lists have had their own (unrelated) debate sloshing around between them, as a sort of kicker to the volume. As a result, I believe we got north of 400 non-spam emails yesterday, and trying to find the stuff that actually *matters* in the middle of all of that, even using Comcast's new "Now With Less Suck" online email reader, is bloody hard.

Really need to deal with getting that desktop machine working again. As an email life preserver, if nothing else...

Comments

[anastasiav.livejournal.com]

There's a society level Pelican list?

[msmemory.livejournal.com]

Yes, a Yahoogroup "Pelicans"

[mikekn]

That was my reaction too :)

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

The fact that right next to each other on my friends list I see you and goldsquare posting about being overwhelmed by floods of email is deeply amusing to me.

[eclecticmagpie.livejournal.com]

One possibility: temporarily set up a gmail account, use it to read your comcast mail, and it's a much better webmail interface than comcast.

[laurion]

That was going to be my recommendation too. Gmail can access Comcast via POP or IMAP, and be set to leave the mail on Comcast's system, or not.

If nothing else, GMail will collapse all the threads of one topic into a single 'message', and filters are a breeze, as is searching (of course, it's google).

[jducoeur]

Hmm. That's an interesting hack that hadn't occurred to me. If things don't clear up soon, I may look into it -- thanks for the idea!

(I don't even need a temporary gmail account. I *have* a gmail account, not to mention the two Google Apps sites I own. Just hadn't thought to use it as a front end to Comcast...)

[eclecticmagpie.livejournal.com]

It will take you about 10 minutes...