It has been so long since I posted one of these, that new readers (those few I have) may have no idea what this is. Starting around when I left Pittsburgh to head to Washington, DC to try to find a real post-college career rather than the random stuff I was doing in Pittsburgh for a little while after graduation, I started compiling and sending out an “email top ten list” each month based on which of my friends had sent me the most personal email the previous month.
Basically, the main purpose was as a mechanism for me to keep in touch with people. If people fell off the “top ten” and stayed off for a few months, I’d notice that and email them. But in the mean time, the “contest” took on a life of its own, even though there were no prizes. People would actively try to win in some months. When several people were trying in the same month, this could sometimes be a little annoying… people would do things like sending me 5000 separate emails each with a single word in it and such. (By the way, emails I suspect as automated have always been disqualified, so these would have to be manually done emails or at least be good enough automation to fool me.) But it was still fun. And it did result in lots of email, and with keeping in touch with people. And sometimes even to make new friendships when people would discover the contest and start sending email.
All the previous results can be found here and a retrospective of the first 100 months of the contest can be found here.
Then in October 2004 there was a meltdown on my email server, and I lost several weeks of email. Which through me into a real tizzy, cause first of all, I lost email and I’d kept in one form or another every email I’d ever sent or received since 1993, but second because it made putting together the count for both September and October of 2004 very difficult.
Anyway… for a variety of reasons, doing the reconstruction got put pretty far back on the stove, and literally I’d only do a few minutes of work on it each month. So there has been a 28 month delay in putting out the October 2004 results. Oops.
But they are finally here! Click through below for the details and the winners:
But after the disastrous email meltdown of October 2004, which caused missing data in both September and October of 2004, I was so disheartened. I tried my best with the September info, but I was still late. After that, after being late for the first time in the history of the email top ten, it just seemed to be of little point. Once it was broken, it was broken. So I continued to work on the reconstruction of the October 2004 email results, but rather than just spending the hours straight through to get it done, I did a few minutes worth each month. Sometimes an hour’s worth on a good month. But I let other things take priority. I should have made this an absolute priority from the beginning. If I had done that, this quite possibly would have been complete shortly after the September results, but I did not. There were a lot of other things going on these past two years. But with a little bit done each month… and a bump in priority in February 2007 so I did a bit each day instead of a bit each month… we are finally at the end of that road. The October 2004 Top Ten is done!!
Over the next few months I’ll slowly be calculating results from November 2004 to the present and then resume the normal schedule for these things. Since these will just be normal counts of existing mailboxes with no issues, these should go pretty fast. I’ll still space them out some rather than do them all at once. My only goal in terms of that is to release them at a rate faster than one a month so I eventually catch up. Hopefully in less than another 2+ years.