The Devil’s In The DAEMONS

Problems with Emails?
You are not alone.
You are not a

We all have our personal demons, but if you send out a lot of emails on AOL, you also get DAEMONS.

This is very annoying.

First of all I don’t know how to pronounce the word, and when I’m yelling WTF at something, I like to know how the devil to say it. Is it DEE-mon, as I thought, or DAY-mon, as pronounced by those with more technical knowledge than I. That includes most of the civilized world, and anyone, anywhere, under 30, but that’s another story.

I Hate Daemons

However you say it, a Mailer-Daemon simply mean that your Email didn’t go through. But these notices contain very menacing phrases like “fatal errors,” and “rejected due to security policy.” What! Is my blog a threat to national security or something? I think not. Sometimes, the mailboxes are simply full. Annoying, yes, but not . . . fatal.

MAILER-DAEMONS (Don’t they know that using ALL CAPS is like shouting?) are not my only problem. There are some very confusing things going on with email.

For instance, what do you do when you get an email with this subject:
“Don’t open the email from me.”

Huh?

It turned out that this was referring to a previous email, but how are you supposed to know? I opened it with great trepidation. What if it had a virus, or a bad cold even.

I think you’re okay if you don’t open the attachment, but I’m not sure. In some unexplored part of my brain, I’m still afraid that I’ll blow up my computer, or cause another power outage on the entire East Coast if I hit the wrong key.

I frequently hit the wrong key, sending off emails that I’m not finished writing, or sending them to the wrong recipient (this can be a real problem). I also keep getting a pop-up for Microsoft Office Help that I didn’t ask for and have no idea what to do with.

And another thing . . .

Why are people always changing their email addresses?

Okay, so they’re sick of AOL, or they’re graduated from college so they can no longer use harvardedu.org, which, according to The Social Network, is the most prestigious email address in the universe, or maybe they think hotmail sounds, well, hotter than gmail. Whatever the reason, I often forget to make the change, and wonder why I got a DAEMON, or why my so-called friend is not answering my email.

I send out Email blasts about new posts, and no one, repeat, NO ONE has been able to tell me the number of recipients you can have on one email, the number of emails you can send out at one time — or within an hour or during the course of the day — without having your message relegated to SPAM, a Fate Worse Than DAEMONS.

If anyone out there has the answer, please tell me, but I don’t think that AOL knows itself. So I send the Emails, hope for the best, and know that at least some are getting through because you make comments.

But there’s hope! As you may know, Emails are becoming obsolete. (Forget phone calls, they’ve been over for ages. As one woman said, when the phone rings, I know it’s my mother: nobody else ever calls.)

Now what we do is text and tweet, so all these archaic problems with Emails will soon be over. For one thing, cell phone numbers seem to stay the same if you change phones or even carriers. Yes!

On the other hand, when I’m fully operational in this Brave New World, I’ll probably be confused in new and exciting ways, sending texts to people I shouldn’t have by mistake, and being constantly interrupted when I’m trying to be off radar.

And a question: Will there be chain letters on texts — and will we be cursed forever if we ignore them?

Worst of all, we’re finding out, as we speak — literally — that I-Phones and Droids are tracking our every move: What the devil is that about?

Oh well. Technology does march on, doesn’t it, and we want to keep up lest we be left in the dust of history, scorned by The Young and The Technically Fearless. But don’t you sometimes feel like chucking it all in and joining the nearest branch of LALA,  Luddites Anonymous, Doubled.

It’s a devil of a dilemma. Or maybe it’s a just a DAEMON. . .

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