Hello everybody! If you’ve sent me email recently and haven’t gotten a response… I’m sorry, see below!
Due to a server meltdown, I lost all email sent to me from about September 15th to the present… and because I was way behind on email due to having a slow internet connection at the moment, plus having had several hurricanes to worry about, plus being busy with the family and new job, I was way behind on answering or sometimes even reading those emails… anyway, about 2000 emails were wiped out without a trace… (I had a local copy of all of them on my own computer, but as soon as it tried to syncronize with the melted down server, all the emails were lost, something I had not anticipated, and so hadn’t made provisions for.)
So if you sent me any emails in that time and have not yet gotten a response, my apologies. It is my fault for taking so long to respond to begin with, but now I don’t even have the email to respond to, and don’t know for sure who all emailed me at the time…
Anyway, point is, if you sent me any emails during that time period and still have a copy of them in your sent mail folders or anything like that, please forward them back to me and I will respond as quickly as I can, and I apologize greatly for not having responded earlier….
(I’d also like to reconstitute as much as my mail archive as possible, so if you have copies of other emails from other people that I was cc’d on please send me those too, so I can answer them as well! Or emails you sent and don’t actually want answers to as well. And while I would love NEW emails too, if you do have a copy of whatever you sent before, that would be MUCH APPRECIATED.)
Thanks everybody. I’ll be very grateful for any emails you are able to forward back to me! (For those familiar with my monthly email contests, emails forwarded back to me from the time period mentioned WILL be counted toward that…)
And for that matter, just to talk to some of you again! It has been awhile for some of you!
(Oh yeah, the abulsme@abulsme.com address will be back soon, but for the moment, please use this abulsme@mac.com address. Thanks.)
Talk to you all soon!
Does this mean the email contest is screwed?
Ah, black Wednesday. Chris lost over 3000 messages and a bunch of documents he needed for work. Serious important stuff. So far it seems I fared a better, only around 100 of my messages and some copies of manuscripts gone (but I have other copies). He’s working on getting the mail sent during the last two days delivered now. There’s 13,681 messages in the queue. A good chunk of that is probably spam.
I don’t have messages from all the way back to Sept. 15, but I do have some from September 25 and on. I’ll send those later on Thursday or Friday once I get all my affairs in order.
Thank you Rebecca. I lost emails with important stuff about mortgages and such, but nothing I suppose which just can’t be done again on the “actually important” side.
On the psychologically important side of course I am devastated. Especially because I *had* copies of everything. And with just a little bit of extra thought I could have backed it all up and would have lost nothing at all. But when I connected to the server after it started to respond again it decided to syncronize with the now empty server, and within seconds it had completely wiped out my local copies of all of the mail.
I tossed and turned all night reliving those two minutes of my life over and over and over again. I shed a lot of tears. I threw up. It was not a pretty night.
And yes Al, this means the email contest for both September and October will be completely screwed. I will try to recreate what I can via emails people forward back to me, and a handful of responses I have to messages I answered out of order and such. And I will give credit to messages I can prove existed in those ways.
However, basically from September 18th to October 14th all email was wiped completely, and I have no way of recovering any of it. So, considering that of the missing MONTH I will likely only be able to ever prove the existance of perhaps a few hundred of the couple thousand lost messages, the counts will not be even close to reality.
I considered not bothering at all, but I think at this point I will do it… get back on the horse and all that.