There's one I like to think of as my "permanent" address-- in Europe, anyway. We're not using that provider at the moment, but we're keeping it on because eventually we'll move and we should be able to use it there.

Then there's our local provider. I have two mailboxes with them-- a personal one and one for my volunteer work.

And then there's the web addresses. They're very useful when we move because we can't always use our laptops to send and receive e-mail right away-- quite often you just can't at the hotel, or local calls are insultingly expensive, and it takes a while to get a phone installed when we do move into an apartment. I have two at Yahoo: my other "permanent" personal address, and one for this diary. But Yahoo has been overdoing the pop-ups and annoying ads, so I opened another two at My Way, which doesn't do that kind of shit. I still need to check the personal one at Yahoo every now and then, because I've met a lot of people over the years and I don't have a way to notify everybody that I've changed addresses.

There are other web accounts as well, ones I never use, or have forgotten about, or use only when I have to enter an e-mail address somewhere and don't want the resulting spam to show up on my usual accounts.

So, with all these accounts, can someone tell me why it's only the one I use for work that gets corrupted?

It must be some sort of subset of Murphy's Law. Gates' Law, or something. All I know is that when I went to write my pages for next month's magazine, and I fired up Netscape mail, all the submissions and information that people had sent to me, that I had left sitting in my inbox, had vanished.

Poof! All gone. There was still trash in the trash can, and copies of e-mails I've sent in the sent folder. The other inboxes I have in my browser still have mail in them, and trash, and things in other folders and everything. But the stuff I actually needed had vanished.

If it had happened on a personal account, no problem. I'd just send out an e-mail to everybody: "Hey, if you've sent me mail..."

Which I couldn't do in this case, because I didn't keep a record of who sent stuff to me, and I don't have the e-mail addresses of those who were likely to have done so. My fault, mostly, which doesn't make things any better.

So, I have had a frustrating few days, scouring my hard drive and finding nothing, calling my provider (no help there), discovering that my provider was hit by the Slammer and e-mails to me were bouncing for two days (but only to that address, of course, the personal address with the same provider was working just fine), calling everyone I could think of who might have sent me mail, leaving messages and explaining what the problem is over and over and over again.

All that, and I'm still not sure that I've got everything. But it's done now, and it's been sent off for publishing.

Unless the internet's eaten that too, of course.