Spam withdrawal

One of the hardest aspects of dislocation to get used to was the abrupt, almost total cessation of incoming email. For the last 8 years, I've been used to getting a huge volume of email. In the early days it came from answering STCCG rules questions, an active STCCG listserv, and playtesting feedback. As a "remote" employee, virtually all my interaction with the product development team was, of necessity, carried out by email. Finally, I moved to Virginia to work in-house, and while the STCCG traffic had dropped way off by then, damned if my email traffic within the company didn't pick up the slack. (It's hard to believe how many times a day you can email people who are working in an office just a few doors away.) And then of course, there was the spam, up to around 400 a day by the end of 2004.

All in all, it meant that even if I set automatic mail checks to, say, every 5 minutes, I could almost guarantee that something would download every time. It might be nothing but spam, but at least I could tell the mail server was up.

And then my company email address was taken away and rerouted to someone else, so I set up a couple of accounts on my ISP. Suddenly, I'm getting essentially no email. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Now, almost four months later, I may get 3 or 4 emails in an entire day, and those are from a handful of newsletters I subscribe to and the occasional online billing notification. I don't even get spam any more. One piece in a week's time is a lot.

I'm not saying I miss the spam. But after 8 years of email playing a central role in my life, it feels decidedly weird for my mail traffic to almost vanish, literally overnight.