"I've got mail! Yay!"

notreallyhere@mindless.com -> sohmc@wam.umd.edu -> sohmc@cs.umd.edu -> procmail

looks confusing, I know. Many of you wonder why I have so many e-mail addresses, why I use one over the other, etc. I will attempt to explain how my e-mail works in this page. If you get confused, just relax, get a cup of water, and start from the beginning. All questions will be answered.

This page will walk you through an average e-mail, sent to notreallyhere@mindless.com.

mail is sent to notreallyhere@mindless.com

mindless.com was origionally a domain name purchased by iname.com, who sold their properties to mail.com. Since the dot-com bust, iname had to consolidate the number of domains it controlled. Finding it hard to continue with free services, it started a subscription-based service where users had the option to pay $10 a year to keep their e-mail address. notreallyhere@mindless.com is a child of that.

notreallyhere@mindless.com is a forwarding address. Anotherwords, all mail sent to this address will forward to whatever e-mail address I specify. In my case, I have it forward to my school e-mail account sohmc@wam.umd.edu.

sohmc@wam.umd.edu

sohmc@wam.umd.edu is my school e-mail address, provided by the University of Maryland. Originally, I had set up my mail so that it would download my mail from the school e-mail server. This proved to be unreliable so I had my mail forwarded to my cs.umd.edu account.

Two? Two forwarding address?!

Yes! I aquired notreallyhere@mindless.com BEFORE I enrolled into school.

sohmc@cs.umd.edu

All of my e-mail comes to this account. Once wam.umd.edu forwards my mail to this server, it is processed by a mail filter program called procmail. Based on rules, it will sort my cs.umd.edu mail from mail received from wam.umd.edu.

Please note: please do not send me personal mail to sohmc@cs.umd.edu. Because of the way I filter my mail, I will probably not answer your message in a timely fashion.

backup email

If you haven't noticed by now, e-mail is very important to me. I have several fail-safes just in case something along the chain dies.

1. Daily assessment of mail forwarding and processing: An automated e-mail message is sent every morning to test all of the servers and to make sure that procmail is working correctly.
2. notreallyhere@mindless.com choke: In the event that this e-mail server fails to forward e-mail, I will turn off mail forwarding and begin damage control. An announcement will be made to all contacts stating the status of the server and how it affects them. Historically, the sender does not change anything.
3. sohmc@wam.umd.edu choke: If this server fails, well, there is very little I can do. This will rarely happen, but if it does, messages will be queued until the server comes back up.
4. sohmc@cs.umd.edu choke: e-mail is backed up on several computers. In the event that ALL computers that can access my e-mail go down, I will resort to web-based mail. That address is not disclosed for security reasons.

If your e-mail just forwards to a permanent account, why do you even have notreallyhere@mindless.com?

Good question! notreallyhere@mindless.com functioned as my permanent e-mail address so that no matter who my e-mail provider was, people could always e-mail me. It's second function was as a spam stopper. If spam ever became a problem, all I would have to do is point the e-mail address to another address and I would stop getting mail.

However, since I've gotten an e-mail account from cs.umd.edu

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