The message Jean says she sent
Find a message that never reached your inbox, answer the right one of two from the same person, and put a stop to the post that buried it — with nobody telling you where to look.
Twenty lessons, and nearly every one of them was a small certainty: that it went, that it went to the right people, that it can be found again, that it can be stopped.
Here is somebody else’s email, three weeks of post deep. One message in it has been waiting for an answer since the middle of the month, and one has arrived every single morning since Easter. There are no instructions this time, and no right order.
Key points
- Find a message that never reached the inbox, in the pile the computer put it in instead.
- Answer the right one of two messages from the same person.
- Stop unwanted post arriving at all, instead of deleting the same thing every morning.
What to remember
- Every email account there has ever been keeps that second pile, and it is right about nearly everything in it. It is wrong roughly once a month, and when it is wrong it is wrong about a person: a new address, a first message from somebody, a doctor’s office or a school writing for the first time. Half a minute in there once a week is the whole habit. And the unsubscribe line at the foot of anything from a real shop is quicker than deleting the same email three hundred times — they must honour it. If a message came from somebody you have never heard of, though, leave their links alone and mark it as spam instead: telling a stranger that your address is a live one is the one thing worth not doing.
- Honestly — how was that?
Try this
Open the Spam or Junk folder on your own email and read what is in it. Nearly all of it will deserve to be there. About one message in fifty will not, and that one is the reason the folder is worth a minute a week.
Practice: The message Jean says she sent. Your first lesson is free, with no account or card; the rest are part of a Lantern plan. Interactive lessons require JavaScript.