pain causes pain

[Guest guest]

Hi,

This is not a particularly appropriate post to this list, but it is about

pain in a round-about way. I know(knowledgewise) that chronic pain and its

often accompanying depression problems certainly can affect what you do &

judgement.

I have struggled to put out a little internet business newsletter for the

past year & 3 months. Apart from writing & sending it, the toughest part is

getting subscribers.

well, along came a new 'ezine cooperative for exchanging advertisements, &

I joined. The result has been that my ad for a free subscription has been &

probably still is being carried by quite a few other 'zines. In the

beginning (about beginning of April), I started getting a reasonable flow

of new subscribers to my old website, which handled the subscription

automatically.

To save quite a bit of money, I also changed hosting companies that month,

and still got the subscription requests forwarded to my regular email. The

original server had the ability to automatically keep a list of new

subscribers, as well as forward the email subscription request to me, and

also send out an informative confirming email.

I thought the new server would work the same way, because it had a very

similar email handling system. Well, April & May were chaos ridden months

for me. Did not get to setup the new site for a few weeks, but I thought

that was OK since I was still getting subscription requests forwarded by

the new server. But then I went to work putting up the website (old & needs

to be replaced). While doing that, I learned the system could not

automatically keep the subscriber list, but did everything else just fine.

Since I was distracted by many things, including discomfort, I really

didn't think through what I was doing. Just naturally assumed I setup the

new server to keep on forwarding me subscriptions.

I really didn't pay any attention to whether they were being forwarded or

not, because my old server would keep anything that wasn't forwarded in

it's own mail system, & I could get it by logging on.

I forgot about the whole thing for awhile, focusing on how I was going to

get out the tons of ads the coop was sending me. Now, 3 months later, I

noticed the last subscriber email was dated May! AArrrghhhh! my server

wasn't forwarding & wasn't keeping subscription requests. So by chance, I

just went back to the server today to see what I did, or didn't do.

Humnn. It was what I didn't do. I just did a very sloppy job of setting up

the server, and didn't put in the commands to redirect certain mail (all

subscriber functions) to my regular email account. After choking &

sputtering for awhile, I corrected everything & tested it & things were fine.

Well, I suppose I was lucky to have just lost 3 months. I probably lost a

good several hundred subscriptions that I can't recover. At least now I

will get all further ones. It's either the disorganizing effects of chronic

pain & depression, or early senility, or both.

Ken