More or less offline

3 Comments

Frustrating. All evening tonight, I've been checking email; each check involves about five minutes of overhead, followed by downloading three to four messages and then stalling. So the effective download rate is about two minutes per message.

Since I get something like 600 pieces of spam a day at this point, this isn't a useful way to check mail. I can use Pair's webmail interface to delete most of the spam, but only slowly—if I try to delete more than 9 messages at once, the server stops responding.

Last night and earlier tonight, I was able to send mail, but at this point I can't even do that. I've tried sending from Eudora and from the webmail interface, and neither one works. The SMTP server responds at first, but then my mailer sends the DATA command and the server doesn't answer.

So I'm effectively offline for the time being. I'm hoping to be able to head into town and find an Internet café tomorrow. In the meantime, I apologize to those of you to whom I owe email.

Oh, and this also means that SH autoresponses aren't going out. Gah. If I still can't send mail tomorrow, maybe I'll ask Susan and Karen to send the autoresponses. Or maybe I'll try to find some other way to do it.

Speaking of the magazine, it's usually my responsibility to create the threads in the Forum and link new material to them, but I can't do that tonight 'cause I can't log in to the SH account. And I can't send mail to any SH people asking them to do it. So could someone on SH staff drop a note to Kelli or someone asking them to handle Forum threads this week? Thanks!

3 Responses to “More or less offline”

  1. David Moles

    So the SH autoresponses actually mean “has arrived on Jed’s laptop”?

    There’s something almost… retro about that.

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  2. Michael

    Hardly seems like an autoresponse at all. I thought “autoresponse” generally meant “confirmation that no human is ever likely to see this message.”

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  3. Jed

    Yeah, it’s pretty retro. Perhaps I should call it a pseudo-auto-response? Or perhaps a semiautomatic response?

    I get paranoid about things getting lost in transit; I would hate to have the server send an autoresponse to a submission and then have the story get lost en route from the server to my computer.

    If I were ever offline for extended periods, this would be a bad approach. But I don’t think I’ve been offline for more than three days in a row in many years, so it works okay.

    Except, of course, that a bunch of ISPs have started greylisting messages sent from T-Mobile. Which means that when I’m on the road I have to send autoresponses and then re-send them later. Argh.

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