If, at anytime during the past year or so, you wrote an email to desk@subtraction.com or happened to make a typo while sending a message to my ‘real’ email account, or you just decided to make up an email address like, say, spam@subtraction.com and send me a note there, then you probably think I’m really kind of stuck up. See, I wouldn’t have replied to any of those emails, but the reason isn’t because I’m a self-centered bastard; rather it’s because, unbeknownst to me, those messages weren’t being forwarded to me as they should’ve been.

I realized this yesterday when a co-worker sent an email to an address that was very close but not quite exactly the same as my true email account. After a while, when I didn’t reply to it, he asked me if I had received it and I said no, I hadn’t, — but even if he had misaddressed the message, my catch-all email alias should’ve gone ahead and forwarded it to one of my regular accounts. So I did a little digging, and I realized that those misaddressed messages, and messages for certain other accounts (e.g., desk@subtraction.com) were being forwarded to an account that I had completely forgotten about.

Upon realizing this, I immediately went to see what else was waiting for me there, and I found, literally, some 5,660 odd emails, many dating all the way back to early 2002, if you can believe it. Of course, the vast majority of them were pure spam, but there were a good many number of messages sent earnestly by people that I would’ve genuinely been pleased to communicate with. Those messages were stuck there in a strange kind of limbo, unread and silently, patiently waiting until now to reveal themselves to me and cause me much embarrassment.

I replied to a few of them today, and those people were gracious enough to forgive my faux pas. But in trying to root through some five and a half thousand messages, I simply had to decide to trash everything that my mail client had determined might be spam, rightly or wrongly. There was simply no other way to get through all the messages, because even then I had to root through about 1,500 that were deemed ‘good.’ It’s likely that I trashed some legitimate messages with those bad messages… so on the off chance that you tried to communicate with me, never received a reply and are forgiving enough to give me another chance, please email me!