Showing posts with label email. Show all posts

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Mom: I originally used the aol "you got mail" wav for my work email. Unfortunately, my boss thought I was looking at personal stuff .. the only way I could prove it was to receive mail in her presence ... Then I changed the wav ... to george carlin. that lasted about 10 minutes ... even I was annoyed by his voice. settled on rosie o'donnell
me: so george carlin annoyed you in 10 minutes, but rosie is fine?
Mom: his wav is VERY LOUD!!!!

me: Have you guys managed to retain my previous emails about the flights, or do you need me to resend those missives?
dad: Probably have them, but wouldn't be just as easy to send them as to ask if i have them?
me: Then you wouldn't have had a chance to bask in the glory of my amazing sentence in which I use an archaic word to refer to modern technology. Duh.
dad: I'm more impressed by the use of the proper grammatical structure for the prepositional phrase!

As some of you might know, I've had a Yahoo mail account for years. Although it's original purpose was for sites that I didn't trust not to send metric assloads of spam (eBay, anyone?), it also served as an email address that would never change for various family members that never quite figured out the whole intarweb thing. I always kept a tab with Yahoo mail open, and generally checked it once a day. That is, until a week ago.

I had set up my account so I would only need to type in my password once every two weeks (it originally defaulted to 24 hours, if I remember correctly), so it seemed a little odd when I suddenly had to reverify my credentials twice on the same day. The second time, I was informed that since I had either 1) not accessed my account in four months or 2) requested that my account me deleted, my account was disabled and that every email had been deleted. WTF? I had certainly not deleted my account, and I had just logged in hours ago. Since then, I've been sending emails to Yahoo to find out what happened and if anything can be done to recover my lost email. Not one has been answered, though they have very helpfully encouraged me to upgrade to a paid account to prevent this problem from reoccurring during the reactivation process.

Now, I understand that it's a free account and that you get what you pay for, but that doesn't make me feel any better about the lost emails or their complete lack of a response. Additionally, since they kept pushing for me to get a paid account, I can't help but wonder if this was a ploy to get me to fork over $19.99. Regardless, Yahoo has officially lost me as a customer and will forever more have two fewer eyeballs to view their ads.

For years I have been using sbp2001+label@ or sbprice+label@ to automatically sort email based on who the email address is given to. Many websites, especially tech ones, have no problems with addresses formatted as such. However, I'd have to guess that half of the websites that I have attempted to grace with an actual email address have rejected email addresses of this format. Some of them have come right out and said '+' is an invalid character, and that I should correct my typo. One was even more helpful and just removed the offending character, then asked me to validate the new email address. In a few instances, I've even sent emails explaining this problem and why they should fix it to the webmasters of offending sites. I've also flat out refused to register with a "properly formatted" email address and just left the site on many occassions.

My point is this - how do so many website developers not know about this common convention? Grrr.