---
title: 'Email communication breakdown post-mortem'
caption: "I love email, but it's hard to handle a lot of it"
date: '2024-01-02'
intro: 'From the end of 29 October 2023 until 2 January 2024, some emails sent to me fell between the cracks'
authors: 1
---

Between the 29th of October 2023 until the 2nd of January 2024, emails sent to
joost@joost.at (my personal email) or various @freesewing.org email addresses
went unnoticed. Since noticing the issue today I have gone through the backlog
and set aside any messages that I need to deal with.

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However, this is a manual and tedious process so it's possible that I'll miss a
few. In addition, it's also very possible that emails sent to me 2 months ago
required a speedier response.

These emails would have included users asking for help, but also notifications
about new patrons who've signed up or any donations FreeSewing received.

I'd like to apologize to all those who I should have been in touch with but
didn't. To be as transparent as possible, I will explain in detail what
happened below, and outline the steps I've taken to avoid this from happening
again in the future.

## My email setup To understand what happened, I should start by explaining my

email setup.

I have historically used joost@decock.org as my personal email. It's tied to
Google in the way that is no longer possible today, using one of those
grandfathered-in domain setups that they don't allow you to have any longer. I
don't trust Google as far as I can throw them, but Gmail is the best mail
client for my needs because I don't want to spend my time carefully organizing
email, I just want to search and find what I'm looking for. Nothing comes close
to Gmail when it comes to that.

Furthermore, as an Android user, this primary not-really-gmail-but-still-a-bit
Google account is also tied to my phone, and a host of other things that are
important. In other words, I need to have _some_ Google account, so this is it.

That being said, I don't trust Google to not one day accidentally disable my
account and I know full well that when that happens, I won't have any way of
getting it back because Google doesn't do support. And I can't even blame them
as I'm not a paying customer. So I want a different email provider, one where
I am a paying customer, and that provider is fastmail. I could have migrated
the decock.org domain to it, but that poses two problems:

- I still need a Google account
- Some members of my family have a decock.org email address, so I would have to
  find a solution for them too and they are not too tech-savvy so that would
  have been a hassle.

So, a couple of years ago I decided to bite the bullet, bought the joost.at
domain, and made that my primary email.

Obviously, my previous emails is still used by people and companies, and I have
to keep the Google account active too, so now I have two inboxes to manage. I
thought I had found a clever solution for that, and that's where things went
wrong.

## It worked until it didn't

I had setup my Google account to pull in email from my fastmail account via
POP3. This worked great and since both mailboxes are configured to allow me to
send email from both addresses, it's transparent to my correspondents.

That all worked fine. But if I go into the settings and check that rule today,
I see this:

![The image alt goes
here](https://imagedelivery.net/ouSuR9yY1bHt-fuAokSA5Q/blog-email-breakdown-post-mortem-1/public 'An error message saying that emails have not been imported since 29 October
2023')

Google stopped pulling in these emails, and somehow neglected to notify me of
this. Because of this setup, I had not been checking my Fastmail inbox, so
from one day to the next I didn't see anything sent to my new email address.

At this point, you're probably wondering why I didn't notice. The answer is
partially that I get a lot of email, but if I'm being honest, at some level I
probably suspected something was _off_ but I didn't realize exactly what, and
because I was busy looking into it was kicked down the road.

## Going forward

Since I cannot trust Google to reliably pull in the emails from my Fastmail
inbox, I will instead pivot to a _inbox double-zero_ approach. By which I mean,
I will manage both inboxes and apply _inbox-zero_ as that's how I do things.

Given my neglect of my Fastmail inbox, it had 100k+ unread messages in them. I
went through the messages since the end of October and set aside emails that I
need to follow-up on. Then I archived the rest and now am back on top of
things, albeit with a small pile of backlog to deal with.

I am particularly sorry for those people who signed up as patrons or donated to
FreeSewing and didn't even get as much as an acknowledgment. I admit that this
sort of _administrativia_ is not my strong suit, but my response time is not
typically measured in months.

Apologies, and I will try to do better this year.
