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WITI HEALTH
Life Lessons From E-mail
What we envisioned way back then for e-mail has come, and gone. E-mail is now a big pain due to the overwhelming quantities of junk mail. E-mail has become totally unreliable. In fact, Information Week magazine found that only 60-70% of e-mail reaches the intended recipient. You're not getting 30-40% of your e-mail, and it's not all junk that is getting weeded out - you may be missing important e-mails, too. Have you ever re-sent e-mail, asking "Did you get this?" Or have you ever called to make sure your message survived the e-mail gauntlet? Of course you have. How ridiculous what we've had to resort to! I knew that on the trip some RV parks would have WiFi or instant-on phones, but most would not, so keeping up with e-mail might be a challenge. After all, when you're in a 36-foot motorhome with a "toad" (RV-speak for towed car), you can't just swing into the nearest Starbucks to connect up and take a hit of e-mail. And, as hard as it is to believe, you can travel clear across West Texas, for 600 miles, and never see a single Starbucks (or Wal-mart either, for that matter). Thankfully, the state of Texas is putting wireless into rest areas soon to encourage drowsy drivers to take a break. But maybe getting e-mail wouldn't be such a big challenge after all. A WiFi network has sprung up connecting truck stops across the country as truckers need frequent access to e-mail and corporate intranets. I signed up and could just see myself downloading e-mail at warp speed while my husband fueled the RV. Thank goodness for technology! A few days into the trip, it was time to check it out. My computer easily latched onto the wireless network, so I signed on and was ready to fly. Web at high speed. Yes! But I couldn't access e-mail. Between deleting cookies, closing the spyware checker, adjusting Internet security, and changing the firewall, something worked. Pulling message 1 of 2,958. Then the wireless connection dropped. I tried again, and e-mail started over. Why couldn't it start where it left off? After a few more dropped connections, I packed it in, presuming a problem at this location. Next truck stop, same story. Pulling 1 of 4,796 messages. Then the e-mail software blew up! I'd packed archival backups, but didn't think to bring the software installation disk. With Plan B, dial-up at the next RV park, I traded up to more cooperative e-mail software. Even with the new software, there were conflicts between e-mail and the WiFi network. I'm not a WiFi newbie, but I couldn't get them to work together, and somewhere along the way my new e-mail Inbox and Sent messages vaporized. OK, it's time to start vacation and forget about this infernal e-mail. When I returned home, my e-mail provider rebuilt the corrupted e-mail indexes and got me back in business. You're wondering why I didn't let the system filter all that junk. Fair enough. Unfortunately, generic junk filtering doesn't work well for health topics, throwing away too much good mail and keeping the bad. That's why I love my Bayesian filter that learns my criteria, but requires downloading all messages, which usually isn't a problem. What are some life lessons from this e-mail adventure?
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I'm just back from four weeks of travel in the RV with my family, which took us to National Parks across Arizona, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, and Texas. During the business part of the trip, I had planned to keep up with my e-mail, but that proved to be quite a challenge. I'm not an e-mail newbie, having managed an early IBM-mainframe-based e-mail system for a large manufacturer almost two decades ago and led JCPenney's Internet project in the early 1990s, but even so, this time e-mail proved to be much more than I bargained for.