No Email is like a vacation.....sort of....

My corporate mailbox has been homed to a "dogfood" server for many, many months now. Even though it is technically on a test server, I have had very few issues to complain about. This morning I received some IM's from co-workers that they and some external people were getting NDR's when emailing me. I checked by sending an email to myself from my home server and sure enough, it bounces back. A call to the help desk let them know about it and they are working on it.

My mail still isn't flowing correctly, but I am not going to complain. Having ZERO email for 1 day is like having a 1 week vacation at Microsoft. I subscribe to countless distribution lists, receive oodles of email from internal, and oodles of email from the outside world. Email is practically a full time job for just about anyone at Microsoft. If I count the DL's I am on and all other email that comes in, there are 500+ messages everyday that I filter through. Ninety percent of that gets moved to folders by rules, but I still go look for it and filter through it on most days.

I figure not having email today means that once it gets fixed, I will have 2000-3000 messages by Monday morning to filter through. What a way to start the week.

So I enjoyed the no email day by enjoying the moderate weather here in Dallas, Tx, and taking my daughters letterboxing. We found 4 boxes today and plan on meeting my eldest daughter tomorrow to track down a few more in Arlington, Tx.

I am not particularly looking forward to watching the unread mail count grow on Monday, and I will report here what the final number is, but I have to admit that there was a bit of email withdrawal today. I found myself checking my phone now and then before realizing it still wasn't working. That is what a decade of being swamped with email does to a person. Kind of a Pavlov's dog style reaction to checking at least once an hour during daylight hours.

I just stepped away and came back to the laptop. I went to my phone and wiped out the Exchange Activesync config. The goal - stay off email until Monday morning. I will report the damage then.

Cheers!