51dc1d9732
Refer to the CHANGELOG for all info. --------- Co-authored-by: Wouter van Wageningen <wouter.vdub@yahoo.com> Co-authored-by: Josh Munic <jpmunic@gmail.com> Co-authored-by: Jonathan Haas <haasjona@gmail.com>
102 lines
4.8 KiB
Text
102 lines
4.8 KiB
Text
---
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title: 'Email communication breakdown post-mortem'
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caption: "I love email, but it's hard to handle a lot of it"
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date: '2024-01-02'
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intro: 'From the end of 29 October 2023 until 2 January 2024, some emails sent to me fell between the cracks'
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authors: 1
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---
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Between the 29th of October 2023 until the 2nd of January 2024, emails sent to
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joost@joost.at (my personal email) or various @freesewing.org email addresses
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went unnoticed. Since noticing the issue today I have gone through the backlog
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and set aside any messages that I need to deal with.
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<!-- truncate -->
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However, this is a manual and tedious process so it's possible that I'll miss a
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few. In addition, it's also very possible that emails sent to me 2 months ago
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required a speedier response.
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These emails would have included users asking for help, but also notifications
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about new patrons who've signed up or any donations FreeSewing received.
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I'd like to apologize to all those who I should have been in touch with but
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didn't. To be as transparent as possible, I will explain in detail what
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happened below, and outline the steps I've taken to avoid this from happening
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again in the future.
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## My email setup To understand what happened, I should start by explaining my
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email setup.
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I have historically used joost@decock.org as my personal email. It's tied to
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Google in the way that is no longer possible today, using one of those
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grandfathered-in domain setups that they don't allow you to have any longer. I
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don't trust Google as far as I can throw them, but Gmail is the best mail
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client for my needs because I don't want to spend my time carefully organizing
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email, I just want to search and find what I'm looking for. Nothing comes close
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to Gmail when it comes to that.
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Furthermore, as an Android user, this primary not-really-gmail-but-still-a-bit
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Google account is also tied to my phone, and a host of other things that are
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important. In other words, I need to have _some_ Google account, so this is it.
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That being said, I don't trust Google to not one day accidentally disable my
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account and I know full well that when that happens, I won't have any way of
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getting it back because Google doesn't do support. And I can't even blame them
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as I'm not a paying customer. So I want a different email provider, one where
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I am a paying customer, and that provider is fastmail. I could have migrated
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the decock.org domain to it, but that poses two problems:
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- I still need a Google account
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- Some members of my family have a decock.org email address, so I would have to
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find a solution for them too and they are not too tech-savvy so that would
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have been a hassle.
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So, a couple of years ago I decided to bite the bullet, bought the joost.at
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domain, and made that my primary email.
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Obviously, my previous emails is still used by people and companies, and I have
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to keep the Google account active too, so now I have two inboxes to manage. I
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thought I had found a clever solution for that, and that's where things went
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wrong.
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## It worked until it didn't
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I had setup my Google account to pull in email from my fastmail account via
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POP3. This worked great and since both mailboxes are configured to allow me to
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send email from both addresses, it's transparent to my correspondents.
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That all worked fine. But if I go into the settings and check that rule today,
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I see this:
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Google stopped pulling in these emails, and somehow neglected to notify me of
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this. Because of this setup, I had not been checking my Fastmail inbox, so
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from one day to the next I didn't see anything sent to my new email address.
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At this point, you're probably wondering why I didn't notice. The answer is
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partially that I get a lot of email, but if I'm being honest, at some level I
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probably suspected something was _off_ but I didn't realize exactly what, and
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because I was busy looking into it was kicked down the road.
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## Going forward
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Since I cannot trust Google to reliably pull in the emails from my Fastmail
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inbox, I will instead pivot to a _inbox double-zero_ approach. By which I mean,
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I will manage both inboxes and apply _inbox-zero_ as that's how I do things.
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Given my neglect of my Fastmail inbox, it had 100k+ unread messages in them. I
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went through the messages since the end of October and set aside emails that I
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need to follow-up on. Then I archived the rest and now am back on top of
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things, albeit with a small pile of backlog to deal with.
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I am particularly sorry for those people who signed up as patrons or donated to
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FreeSewing and didn't even get as much as an acknowledgment. I admit that this
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sort of _administrativia_ is not my strong suit, but my response time is not
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typically measured in months.
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Apologies, and I will try to do better this year.
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