The One about the e-mail nightmares…

In a recent article featured on CNN.com about e-mail nightmares.  It made me think if I may have had any e-mail nightmares myself and all of a sudden, many memories came to mind.

Probably the one I remember the most is back in 1994 or so, when I created a mailing list for a musical group but before Yahoo! groups, a lot of mailing lists were housed at certain companies.  Of course, I had no access at the companies at the time, so we did things the old school way of people sending me their posts and I would use software like Eudora to send it to all of the mailing list members.

I discovered a major flaw or bug when I accidentally mistyped the mailing list address but with an extra period.  What happened was that the message would somehow re-send to the members every few minutes and my ISP wasn’t sure why it was happening and Eudora was surprised by it as well.  By the end of the day, everyone on the mailing list received hundreds of the same message.

The message kept duplicating and duplicating and visions of the film “Gremlins” just came to mind.

Another situation happened between myself and another entertainment writer that I was co-writing an article with for a major entertainment magazine in the US.  It was a written project that included three writers and somehow, the other two didn’t really get along.  So, one of them ranted about the other person and I responded to her.  The person responded to me back but somehow included the other writer in the message and it eventually became a crazy situation and taught me that if people want my opinion, then I prefer to call them up about it, not e-mail it.

Everyone has a distinct writing style when it comes to e-mail.  Some people may seem very stuck-up and some quite ignorant but when you meet them, they are totally different.

I tend to tell a lot of my friends and clients that I receive several hundred e-mails a day from various entertainment industries.  So, I speed read a lot.  But there are times when I’ll miss the questions that some may expect a reply from and some may wonder, “why hasn’t he written back to me”.  Those who know me, know that again, because the massive e-mail amounts I get per day…if you need an important question to be answered, call me.

But yeah, those are pretty much my e-mail nightmares…

I remember in the late 90’s, there were films and even dramas based on people finding love by “accidental e-mails” and although fantasy, I often wondered if any of that happened in real life?  I can tell you that I’ve had my fun (let me emphasize…many, many, many years ago) with accidental phone calls and literally speaking to a women on the other line.  But do people find love through accidental e-mails?

Hmm…