VIRGINDOTNOT

The midweek “Right Royal pain in the a**e” moment this week came courtesy of my email providers who managed to contrive a situation where, for a couple of hours at least, my account got bombarded by all manner of junk emails in an escalating spiral of people replying to people and jumping on the opportunity of having a “free publicity” mailshot bandwagon until it all kind of fizzled out after I’d given up deleting them all and gone off to bed expecting to have to wade through a backlog of a huge mountain of them the next morning.

As it was, after a couple of hours of deletions, it seems to have been nipped in the bud relatively soon afterwards and the clearance required the next day added up to about eighty emails which was, in the great scheme of things, not so bad.

I’m usually so careful, too. Anything at all that looks even vaguely “dodgy” gets consigned to the bin, probably meaning that over the years I’ve chucked away several messages that I ought not to have done and thrown away opportunities and friendly messages galore, which might explain many things, but still seems like the best policy.

Basically, my email service sent out a mailshot to all of their customers advising of an upcoming change to their relationship with the all-consuming Google who appear to have got pissed off with everyone ignoring GMail and have decided that the only way to get people using it is to make it mandatory for their services.

So far, so corporate.

This was, of course, more of an annoyance than everything, and because I checked the link to see precisely which services it was referring to, and found out that it included my blog platform (“hello!”), I thought that I’d better see if I could dig out my old GMail address from wherever I scribbled it down however many years ago it was that I signed up for it.

In the meantime, dark clouds gathered.

Being unable to find it written down anyway, I relaunched my email account just to see whether I had an acknowledgement of the sign up in an old email anywhere, and noticed a sudden influx of emails from unexpected sources, some of whom were claiming that the original mailshot was a “scam” and others telling people not to click on any of the links within it…

Uh-oh…

Then, of course, the spiralling began, and I spent the next hour-and-a-half deleting the emails from all of those people saying “stop sending email” without any sense of irony, and the hundreds of people who had found out that this was an unexpected opportunity to “reply all” to a vast number of people in order to promote their own internet service or blog or Pinterest account.

(No, I wasn’t one of those people…)

Meanwhile, courtesy of the miracle of TwitWorld, I was able to communicate directly with my email providers and try to find out the fundamental question which was still bothering me: Was the original notification that I’d have to switch to GMail genuine or not…?

Naturally, at first they seemed rather clueless, as if this whole surge of email bombarding their servers was something about which they were unaware, but gradually, after a little to-ing and fro-ing in which I was reluctant to reveal my email address to the six people on TwitWorld who seem to give a damn what I think, I was able to find out that the original email was a genuine requirement, even though they’d managed to create a monumental error in the way they had distributed it.

Still, it seems all better now this morning and, if my usual blogging services are to be maintained, now all I have to do is dig out that old GMail address from somewhere in the back of my mind, and click on the link provided, and wait for the next deluge as that turns out to be yet another ghastly mistake.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-27057112