Wonderful Web Women

I’m so sorry if you received 15 newsletters, all identical, over the last 2 days. I am in the middle of a technical nightmare and to be honest, it has nearly driven me to give up completely!

Have you ever been in that situation when you feel that the technology is controlling and ruining your life? You know, like in one of those movies where the machines develop the intelligence of humans and then take over the world? You just feel like waving the white flag and saying “OK. You Win. I give up”. Well, that describes my last 2 days.

Let me explain what is happening and hopefully you will learn from my problems. Because, as much as I hope this doesn’t happen to you, one day it WILL. It is just a fact of life if you are running an on-line business you will have to deal with technology that does weird things for no apparent reason.

Why email is like plumbing

The other week, the faucet fell off my kitchen tap. I’m not really a plumber, so I mean the bit where the water comes out. Well, as you can imagine, water went everywhere with a lot of force behind it. I got saturated as I tried to find the right tool, find the washer, twist it on etc etc. Eventually I got so saturated that I got the giggles. It was all too ridiculous.The only way I could fix it was to go outside and turn the water off at the mains to the house. It stopped the water going every where so I could concentrate on fixing the problem.

Yesterday I woke to find that I had the email equivalent of the faucet coming loose and spraying water everywhere. Before I went to bed at 1am (I know, working too late) I sent off an email newsletter to the Wonderful Web Women database. I do this a couple of times a week. Easy as clicking the send button. Because our list is so large we can’t send every email at once. Every ISP would think we were spamming and punish us. So our software sends out 100 emails every 10 minutes. As you imagine, it can take quite a while to send out thousands of emails but at least it means they are more likely to end up in your email rather than getting knocked back. The process that controls this is called a cron job.

Here’s where it get’s like plumbing.

For some unknown reason, the email got caught in some kind of loop and when it finished sending out the newsletter it decided to send it out agan, and again. Just like that movie Ground Hog Day. AHHHH!!! So I woke to all these emails from members letting me know that they had received the email 7 times ! We couldn’t find out what caused the problem but then our host, Kenneth from Windy City, saved us by doing the host’s equivalent of turning off the water mains. He removed the cron job.This also means I can’t send any more emails until I find out the cause of the problem.

What now?

The developers of our software are the only ones that can help us. Unfortunately, their help desk is slow and frustrating. So while I wait for them to find out what caused the problem I am breathing deeply, visualising a calming place and trying not to *&%#@ swear too much!

On a positive note

2 really positive things have come out of this.

1. I received so many emails from members letting me know that there was a problem, and you know, out of the scores of emails I received, only one was abusive. Every one was supportive, caring and understanding. What a great bunch you all are! I’m so grateful because you turned what could have been a depressing experience into something positive.

2. I realised again the importance of a great host. Kenneth, our host, reacted quickly and went out of his way to help. As your on-line business grows you realise just how important a good host is. We are so happy with our host’s service that we have moved all our web sites to his servers and have asked Kenneth to put together a special deal for our members so you can benefit from great support. I’ll keep you posted.CheersJanet

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