For various and strange reasons I had to go poking around in the e-mail filter settings for my U of M e-mail account. In the process I discovered that 1,500 (!) messages have been blocked in the last two weeks alone. Add to that the 53 that Thunderbird decided were spam and autofiltered, the 155 that I threw away either because I wasn’t interested or I’d dealt with them, and the 250 still in my inbox (over half still unread), not to mention the probably several dozen I filed off to other mailboxes, and that’s a lot of e-mail headed my way in a 14 day period. (scribble, scribble, scribble,…carry the 1…scribble, scribble, scribble…) Yeah, that’s pushing 500 e-mails in two weeks (not counting the 1,500 I never saw because the U’s filters kindly kept them out of my life), or about 36 a day. And that’s over a very quiet period because we weren’t in classes and many people were away from their computers. It’s probably quite a bit closer to 100 a day during the semester with (sadly) a correspondingly higher rate of unprocessed mail.
Ugh. And the semester starts up again tomorrow.
Don’t get me wrong – I love teaching, but this e-mail thing is really a downer, both for all the time it takes and for the psychic energy it sucks up in the form of guilt over mail unprocessed.
Ugh.
Shame I can’t instead be like John Peel and have a shed full of CDs and tapes and random demos that I haven’t had a chance to listen to!
