I’ve been on the road and over-dosing on work lately, so this last holiday weekend I took a rare break from my email.  Three blissful days of connecting with humans (mostly family) in realspace.

Turns out, the spammers did not follow my lead.  They’ve been extremely active.  And once again, one or more of them used qualitytree.com in the return address (e.g. “randomaddresshere@qualitytree.com”).  The result: as we speak, my email client is pulling down thousands of bounce messages to the tune of 37Mb worth of “I’m sorry to have to inform you that your message could not be delivered to one or more recipients.”

My email client thinks it will be done in 3 hours.  It will then take me quite a while longer to dig out of the mess.  Yuck.  And that means that if you are waiting on email from me, it will be a while.

This also means that I need to spend some time figuring out a better email management strategy.  And that’s not quite as simple as it sounds for a variety of reasons related to how I manage email aliases and the options available with my current ISP.

Oh joy.

Ironically, a friend was just telling me how his 15 year old daughter hardly uses email at all.  She uses IM & Facebook instead.  The only emails she gets are from her parents.  Apparently email is so 1990s or something.