BT Yahoo & The 160,000 Emails

Today was supposed to have been a relaxing day for me and Emily and a chance for Jon to catch up on some work, which he doesn't normally get to do on a Saturday as I'm usually busy with writing deadlines. Instead, BT Yahoo have sent us the curse from hell. This morning's first email check resulted in Outlook Express downloading, over the course of a couple of hours, non stop, over 42,000 emails. Dozens and dozens of copies of emails long since deleted stretching right back months and months. Nothing could be sent, because it was too busy downloading. If we exited the program without it finishing, it just started from the beginning again next time it was opened. And once it had finished....drumroll, please..... it started over again. And again. Three lots of of 42k+ emails downloaded taking all day. Meanwhile, BT Yahoo's online mail site is down. But of course.

Frantic googling to find a solution to the problem - and problem it is, because not only does it take hours and hours to download, it then takes more hours to delete the lot, which has to be done otherwise it runs out of memory and stalls the whole damn computer; and we have to let it finish each downloading session before we can send anything. I have copy to send to various places to meet deadline, and I can't get any of it sent. We did what we could according to the hints we found, unchecking the "keep mail on server" boxes and tracking down and deleting a particular .dbx file, both of which were supposed to fix it. Nothing did.

In desperation, Jon downloaded Thunderbird, a new email program and set that up. Worked perfectly.....and started to download the 42,000 emails. So that's over 160,000 today. So far. And we still haven't found a solution. I love technology. Am fighting very hard to stay calm. Am also mystified as to why no internet searches reveal anyone else having the problem on this scale - I've found a few forum posts of people complaining they received approx 40 duplicate emails. Heh. Not quite the same, methinks. So, if anyone has any bright ideas, please do yell. Says she, calmly.

Anyway, upshot is that Jon has managed to get hardly any work done, and we've both spent hours trying to fix the bloody mess. Hardly what we had planned for the day.

Trying to turn a blind eye to the crisis upstairs, today is my Dad's birthday, so bright and early this morning Emily and I baked him a big tray of chocolate flapjacks iced for his birthday, which were rather scrummy indeed. No cake as such, because he and I are sharing a "birthday tea" on Monday :-))

Yesterday Jackie and her girls came round for the day; much ooohing and aaahing over kittens and comparing them to their siblings still at Jackie's. Lots of productive work done too, with the girls getting to grips with genetics (both human and feline, lol) and having lots of fun with our encaustic wax art set in the afternoon.

Voldemort and Severus continue to be astonishingly cute. Only problem is that they do like to climb all over us while we're trying to eat at night. Voldemort ended up with his paws in my gravy the other night, which he naturally thought was hugely wonderful. I was less impressed. Ewwwww. I did surpass myself in my efforts to distract them during our meal, though. They love ping pong balls but of course two minutes after they have one, they've lost it. Jon found an old tray with a deep rim on it, and I loaded it up with lots of ping pong balls - they spent well over an hour chasing them around and around the tray, rofl. They've been playing with it on and off ever since too, although Voldemort didn't take long to work out how to scoop the balls out with a paw, so he can still manage to lose them. Here's Severus getting in on the action:
The kittens' characters do reflect their literary personalities somewhat, actually. Voldemort is very much the boss, can be quite psycho when he gets going (!!) but deep down is a bit of a scaredy cat despite all the bravado. Severus is outwardly much more a "watch and wait" type cat, content to let his brother get into mischief before sweeping in to save the day. He gives the impression that there's a lot going on in his head, very thoughtful cat, very measured in what he does. He's much braver than Voldemort when it comes to the crunch. We've rebuilt the huge cat climbing tree we had for Romeo and Juliet, which is almost my head height (we had to take it down when Pome and JuJu got too heavy for it and it was constantly under threat of collapse!). Voldemort was straight in there climbing right up to the very top, where he likes to sleep. Fine - but he hasn't figured out how to get down, rofl, and stands there mewing a bit pathetically when he needs rescuing! Sev Sev doesn't bother going up to the top, but sleeps half way up. When he's watching his brother mewing at the top, you can almost hear him thinking "Silly sod. Ego too big for his paws again!" On the other hand, Severus is much more adventurous on the stairs than Voldy is and much braver when it comes to exploring the unknown, but he's sensible enough to know his limits! But they're both astonishingly affectionate and snuggly :-))