intertwingly

If you have found me to have been even less responsive than usual to email in the past few days, it is because I have had a mail malfunction.

Friday morning, I had a blue screen of death.  I am running Windows XP Professional Version 2002 Service Pack 1 on my T41 laptop.  When I rebooted, my inbox was gone.  Without a trace.  For the next two days, I ran my email off of my Linux desktop, and I switched back yesterday to my laptop, just before I went to the airport to head to San Diego.

At the airport, I found an open WiFi connect and got my mail.  My inbox disappeared again, without the blue screen this time.  Mozilla put up a dialog box complaining about a truncation error trying to move some spam email to my Junk folder.  Underneath it all was a message box by Norton AntiVirus indicating that it had quarantined a file... my inbox.

I checked the quarantine area, and sure enough, there was one small file there... the previous attempt to quarantine apparently was not complete.

I do have a backup of my inbox from a few weeks ago.  But any emails from the past week are pretty much gone.

It seems that this is a known problem.  The proposed solution: exclude your inbox from the virus scan.