Oh, oh, how glad I am that I am not in e-commerce. If I were, I would now be standing on a street corner rattling a tin cup.
I was looking for something in my site's control panel. (Not CPanel. My host is so huge they've got their own, in the same way that some forums are so huge, they roll their own instead of using php/bb.) Didn't find it, of course. See thread title. But along the way I noticed that one of my site's mailboxes was unnaturally fat. In fact it should weigh in at zero, like all the others, since I don't use my domain name for e-mail; everything auto-forwards to a "real" address somewhere else. (On account of I am not an ISP and my name is not amazon dot com.)
After much clicking I arrived at webmail. I must have been there at least once in the past, because the Keychain very kindly offered to give me its password.
Gulp. Turns out I had one e-mail address that I'd never set to forward anywhere. This should not have been an issue, because the address is never used anywhere (it's lucy24 at example dot com). But apparently nobody told the 20-odd people who have sent mail to this address since early 2011. Some were spam. This not good. It is bad, because it tells me I'm not dealing with type-ins who had transitory brain ###s resulting in "one from column A, one from column B" addressing errors. Some were from people I know, encouraging them to think I am flaky and irresponsible. Insert formulaic wisecrack ad lib. One was from a person I would have very much liked to know*. One was from someone who wanted to send me money. In mid-2012, unfortunately. Not now.
In the fine tradition of locking the barn door et cetera, this address has now been set to auto-forward just like all the others. As far as I can figure out, the last time it can have appeared on any page anywhere is in August 2012 (when my include footer took on its final form and was added to all pages).
There's a thread for this kind of thing, isn't there?
* For two reasons. One of them is that she came across a page that has sentimental value** to me-- and she understood it :)
** Not to be confused with the recently added page that has two separate in-jokes. Due to extreme obscurity of content, I'm giving that one five years before I start sulking.
