Breaking up is hard to do

Breaking off my longtime relationship with e-mail is much harder than I imagined -- for the wrong reasons.

My disengagement started at about 6 p.m. Sunday as I sorted through my e-mail files with three goals in mind:
1 . I had to see what was "critically" pending and post my responses before cutting the cord.
2. I knew I would have to delete any extraneous files I could so that my inbox did not overload during the week. That meant looking at the 800 messages in my inbox to see what was worth savingl.
3. Last but (as it turned out) frustratingly not least, I had to set up an auto-response file that would alert senders to the fact that their message would not be read. I knew that Entourage would not do this, but that I could do it in WebMail.

Step One nearly gave me a heart attack. It seemed that every other message from the past two weeks needed an answer before the end of this week. I wrote letters of recommendation for students like crazy, sent recent photos to friends and colleagues, updated the BBC on a student project and even sent out a long note about letterboxing. Before I came to the end of my to-do "pile," I thought I would typing forever.

Step Two was the emotional killer. I was forced -- damnably forced -- to figure out what to do with all thos miscellaneous messages that were sitting in my inbox. It was easy to kill the Viagra "spam" and the reminders of faculty meetings long since past, but there were lots of messages that just seemed too "nice" to delete.

I started by carefully examing each message and filing "keepers" onto my hard drive. But about 50 files into that project, I became ruthless. First I deleted one message at a time. Then I grabbed groups of three or four adjacent messages. Finally, I switched to "by sender" view and started wiping out anything sent to me by a particular sender. In the end, I just saved a handful of files that I might want to get back to me. I also came up with a new philosophy of file management:
"If the message is REALLY important, someone else has it on their computer and can send it to me again,"

So here is RECOMMENDATION #1 from this experiment: Reset my e-mail preferences so anything more than two weeks old is automatically erased. That will force me to archive anything I reallly want. Anything missed probably wasn't important anyway.

And then there was Step Three. I swear sometimes I am haunted by demons of evil technologies. I spent a half-hour drafting this witty but informative message to be automatically returned to senders:

CALL ME
Anyone can give up coffee for Lent or carbs for Atkins -- but how about e-mail?
As part of a research project looking at that question, my e-mail has been disabled until at least Feb. 20. Your message has already been deleted from my computer, so if you really need to contact me, you will have to use telephone, mail or personal contact.
My office number is listed below. My home number is listed in Columbia, MO. If you are really desperate, call or e-mail Denise Meyers, the editorial department administrative assistant, at (573) 882-0860-- or e-mail her at MeyerD@Missouri.edu. Denise can reach me by cell phone.
You can also share my "adventure" and make comments on a special blog : http://coldturkey-clyde.blogspot.com/.

It also included my contact information.

All for naught. I spent another hour and a half trying to get autorespond program to respond. I would toggle on the "Out of office message" option, try a test and get the message. Then I would have Cecile send a test and she would get no message -- and then neither would I.

It seemed to work after I tried it again from campus, but I have to watch it. REALIZATION: If no one know your e-mail is turned off, you are in big trouble. Everyone assumes that a message tossed out into the cyber world will indeed arrive and be responded to.