Life Without E-Mail

Yesterday I woke up early and got ready to head to my morning workout. Before doing so I like to check both work and personal e-mail to make sure I am not missing an important meeting that got scheduled overnight. My work e-mail and calendar showed a clear morning. When I went to get my personal e-mail, I couldn't connect to the server. I didn't worry about it and headed out for some exercise.

I got home and still didn't have access to my personal e-mail. I tried to log into my e-mail service provider's website and couldn't get there either. At this point I knew they must have done something big. I wondered if it had anything to do with the wildfires in Southern California (It did not). On a whim, I logged into my company's VPN which make it looks like I am located in Southern California and managed to get to my e-mail service provider's website. There I could log a ticket with technical support and try to get help.

As a side note, it is tough to get e-mail-based technical support when you can't get your own e-mail. I had to periodically check the website to see if they had any updates. Doing so allowed me to see that they had moved my e-mail server from an old machine to a new one and propagating those changes takes time. Fortunately those changes came through much more quickly on the VPN and I could use a web client to see all of my e-mail. I really only had one important message letting me know I am involved in testing a new outdoor product. That is always exciting.

I went to sleep knowing I could access my personal e-mail from my work laptop. I hoped that everything would be working when I got up in the morning. This morning I headed down to my computer after breakfast and still didn't have access. 

I logged into my e-mail provider's website and looked at the ticket to see if they had any information. They asked for a traceroute. A traceroute is a command you can run in a command-line terminal window to see the path data travels to get from your computer to a specific server on the Internet. On Mac and Linux you just type "traceroute www.google.com" and on Windows you type "tracert www.google.com". Unfortunately my personal network at home traps that information and doesn't allow the path to be seen. This is a security protection and I needed to open the firewall to allow the data through. In desperation I pinged my e-mail server just to see if I could get to it from my home network using "ping mail.myserver.com" and something happened. I started receiving packets back. I tried checking e-mail on my computer and everything seemed to work.

Naturally I updated the ticket with my e-mail service provider and let them know I could get my e-mail now. I read through the useless messages I received overnight and felt a huge wave of relief with that problem solved. I then sent out a very important e-mail that I put off sending last night.

One would think that life without e-mail would be calming. I found it to be quite the opposite as I have become conditioned to getting useless messages throughout my day to prove I am connected. Without e-mail, small-unrelated problems became magnified into larger issues than reality. Now things are working and I feel much better even though I don't have any important messages that need my urgent attention. I wonder if I am addicted to e-mail? Probably.