469eb43c95
This brings blog posts, showcase posts, and newsletter editions into the Docusaurus site. It also adds support for using TailwindCSS inside a container. So this will probably end up being the new freesewing.org site in v4.
102 lines
4.8 KiB
Text
102 lines
4.8 KiB
Text
---
|
|
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.
|
|
|
|
<!-- truncate -->
|
|
|
|
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:
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
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.
|