WELL I THOUGHT MY EMAIL PROBLEMS WOULD BE BEHIND NOW - BUT NO, NOW I HAVE TO DELETE SOMEWHERE AROUND 90% OF WHAT HAS COME INTO MY COMPUTER

 Sorry about missing last week.   My main computer and email are still not completely back up and running from the email software problems I have been having. I really depend on my computer(s) to stay organized.  

What do YOU do with your email to read and keep track of it?

We did have to delete the software and do a clean install of the new software.  By doing this we then had to do a new setup of all my email accounts.  Okay – you have one or two or three email accounts – but as part of my organizing I have somewhere around 15 accounts.  15 accounts – why?  

Well I have my basic account – my family, husband's family and maybe 3 or 4 close friends have this email address – this way I can respond to the most important people in our lives quickly.  

I have an account for my accounting practice for my clients to contact me.  

One of my business clients – a woman in her 80s who still owns, runs and goes to work at her business every day – does not use a computer.  Her alarm company only bills by email.  So I opened up an account for her business to deal with this.  Before the pandemic when I was going in every month I would print out the bills when they came in, bring them with me to her and write the check for her to pay the company.  Since the pandemic I print the bills and mail them to her to pay as I have not being going to her – she mails me copies of the info I need.  

I have an account for the craft business which husband and I have for matters related to the business.

I have an account for my cell phone so it works.

I have an account for my embroidery club – it is used for things related to the club and me.  I have a second account for this club – but this account I have as the treasurer of the club – when I am no longer treasurer the new treasurer will get this account and have records of what the old treasurer (me) sent out, received, and did.  

I have an account for our reenactment unit – it used, for things related to the unit and me.  I also, again, have a second account for the unit as I am, again, treasurer of it.  (When one is an accountant one always ends up being the treasurer.)  This is used for business of the unit and will, again, be passed along to the next treasurer at some point.

I have an email account for this blog – any of you who want to me contact – feel free to do using the blog's email address.

I have 2 email accounts which I use when doing things online – such as various online groups/sites I belong to.  

I have 2 email accounts which were used with other clubs I used to belong to and I have kept for when I send an email and not be known.  

I also have one email account which has a different start to it as when I give the email address by telephone (something I used to do often when making hotel reservations back at the end of 20th century) my normal format has an “f” in it which people hear when talk as “s”, so when I need to give my email address by telephone I use this address as it does not have that problem.

My poor husband sat for 2 days entering all of these accounts into the new software and making sure they work properly.
Biggest problem is that when we talked about wiping out the old program and installing the new I asked him if this would result in just the unread emails being brought into the computer or all of the ones in the accounts.  He assured that only the unread emails would be brought into my computer/the software.  Wrong guess – one email address brought in something like 32,000 emails!!  (And that is one of my junk accounts.) While I might like to have them in my computer I don't NEED emails from 2018 – or more importantly don't even WANT emails from 2008!  

So I spend a good part of every day going through the email accounts in the software and deleting old emails – by the single email or more generally by the page.  I also have to sort some of the ones I am keeping into special folders to be able some emails more easily (such as the emails from USPS telling me what mail was to be delivered to me each day – if you haven't signed up for this service, it is very good to have).  When deleting emails – even single ones – they take quite awhile to be deleted which is annoying and slows the process down.  I figure this could take a month or two or more to finish doing.

I have also found that some – not a lot, but some – emails came through scrambled or unformatted and in at least one case the name in the list does not match the text in the email – it being one of the ones from USPS by title, but not the text in it.  

In addition we made the changeover just before I was due to email out the monthly newsletter for my embroidery club.  I had finished the newsletter just before husband started dealing with all of this – it was written and saved in a text processing program so what I had written was not affected by all of this.  I went to last month's newsletter and copied the list of who it was sent to and pasted that into the email for this newsletter.  Instead of showing the showing the emails it only showed the member's names!  I could not send it out using the information from last month's newsletter.  I hate to push my work off onto someone else – but had to as it serves as the meeting reminder and I wanted it out a month before the meeting – so I sent it the club president (who knew I was having email problems) and asked her to send it out for me.  I send out 2 other copies – one to those who asked about our club and one to certain people in the region management who I am required to send it to.   Those went out a couple of days after I hand copied their information into new address books in the new program.  I have been told that there was problem with this – attached files (including the newsletter) cannot be opened as before – they have to be copied first.  

Throw into all of this – husband set up the program to automatically download emails when I sign on.  At some point I have this changed to wait until I check for emails as if I sign after having checked emails for the day earlier in the day – it will download any new ones when I do not generally want them as if I am back in the account it generally means I need information from something I have already read.  The other problem with this is if I do need to check for email again in ONE account – all of them are downloading any email which has come in.  

THOUGHT OF THE WEEK -
This will be an ongoing project for some time.  There is nothing else I can do to get it all cleaned up.  I am trying to do it logical way – in my case I started with the first email account in the list – not the most important one.  I figure if I have all my emails from the start of 2022 in my computer I can always refer to older ones in my online account if needed.  Only somewhere around 40,000 emails left to sort through!

What do YOU do with your email to read and keep track of it – no really, I am curious what other people do?

COMPUTER PROBLEMS CONTINUE TO PLAGUE US - HAVE YOU UPDATED EVERYTHING FOR THE NEW SECURITY STANDARDS?

 This is my computer problem which has been set aside for the past couple of weeks since it started as husband's computer was much more important than mine.  

I use a software program to check my email – but like most to all of the programs I use, I have not updated it.   I hate adjusting to the assorted changes to programs which invariably come with the update and will put off updating unless necessary for the program to run.  

At the same time husband had the problems with our Win 10 computer the recent security changes to online caught up with me.  I could not use my email program to check my email as I did not meet the new requirements.  Normally I would have had husband deal with the changes – but he was still dealing with the computer problems he had.  So I did what I had to – I started checking email by signing into each email account separately and checking email that way.  I have a number of emails accounts – my general one for family and friends, a couple for when I don't want to be known and may need to drop the account if it gets hacked, one for groups I go to online, one for me for my embroidery guild, another one I use as treasurer of my chapter of same – which I consider to be an email of the chapter and I can pass along to the next treasurer to use, one for me for our reenactment unit, a similar email address for the treasurer of the unit – again, can be passed along to the next treasurer, one for a client – she does not use a computer and her business's alarm company only bills by email – so I set up an email account for her and I monitor it for her, an email for this site, an email address for me for the craft business husband and I have, and about 5 or 6 more for various purposes – some of which are gone and I have the kept the address for junk use.  

I knew I could not sign in and out of all of these accounts daily. I picked the ones most important to check daily and I do so.  The remaining ones I am checking once a week.  Unfortunately for some reason my computer does not like me signing in and out and in and out… one after another.  So around the 4th email address – it gets hung up and I end up having to reboot the computer, same after a few more email checks – I am not talking a lot of emails here – most have none, others might have 3 or 4 at most – but the computer is not happy.  So checking email has become an extended chore.  

Yesterday I asked husband if all was okay with his computer and it was running as before and as needed and it was.  So I asked him to help me setup my email accounts to meet the new requirements.  We spent 3 hours today trying to do so.  It has not happened – not even with one account – and worst of all -  I did not get to check ANY email accounts today – though I am sure I did not miss anything.   We set up an account and then it is rejected when we try to check email.  Latest idea is that we delete the email program and start all over with a new copy and enter each account as it needs to be for the new standards.  

Well – at least we have something to do.

THOUGHT OF THE WEEK -

Don't be like me – keep your programs updated to avoid problems – and don't wait for the last minute to make needed changes.

BOY MY MIND IS FRIED THIS TAX SEASON - WHAT WILL HIT NEXT?

 Okay, as I just added to last week's post which apparently – though I remember posting it – was never posted and has been sitting as draft.  

For some reason I seem to be getting hit a lot lately with crazy things.  As I have mentioned I am an accountant and it is, of course, “tax season”.  As the daughter of two accountants I grew up with tax season so I am accustomed to dealing with same.  I was helping my father making photocopies when same was relatively new in the 1960s – to give an idea of what I mean – First the original and the paper to be copied were run through a slot in the copier where the original was copied onto the paper.  Then the 2 papers came out of the machine.  The copy (and, yes, sometimes we ran the original through by mistake and that was a mess) was then inserted into a different slot in the copier where it was run through the chemicals to make the printing appear on it and fix same to it.  The copies came out wet and had to be hung up to dry – and it all smelled terrible.

I am down to a handful of clients who I prepare individual tax returns for and even less business clients (and two of those are my husband).  The clients I have are mostly my dad's clients, (dad having passed on some decades ago) some started with him in the 1960s or 1970s. The returns are fairly straight forward as they are all retired long ago – nothing to tease my brain.  So while preparing the tax returns takes time and I have to make sure that I have all the info from each client, it is not a brain busting matter to prepare the returns (add instructions, etc.)  

I belong to an embroidery chapter of a national embroidery club.  I serve as Treasurer of same.  The renewals for this organization are due by the end of May, so every year renewals overlap tax season – but I am used to this by now.

So far, so good.

I am also the Treasurer of our reenactment unit. This is not normally any sort of problem or situation during the main part of tax season as dues to our national organization from members,, as well as the dues to our unit, are collected in January and February and the dues to the national organization must be mailed by me to them by March 1.  This year, however, the national organization decided as long as things were quiet due to the pandemic – it was the time to redo their membership records and how they are managed on their end.  As a result they pushed back renewals into later in the year – yes, they are also due the end of May.  But to make things a bit easier, since our unit basically did nothing, the board voted to roll over paid dues from 2020 into 2021.  So only those members who did not renew with unit in 2020 have to renew now with the unit and only those members of the unit who belong to our national organization (and we do not require members to belong, so only about half of our members do) have to renew now.  

I have been working on tax returns – have all done except one friend who always files late (years late) and one client who always asks for an extension – and our return, of course, though our return is actually almost finished – I need the mileage on our car odometer to calculate business use of the car last year and we will get our car back on Friday.  

Forgot to throw that in – our car has been at our mechanic for over 2 months.  He actually gave up early week and husband went looking online and found the same odd problem we have and what people did – so the mechanic was finally able to fix it – but two months ago I did not think to take the mileage off the odometer and will not have it until we get the car back this Friday.  

I went to file extensions for the client who needs them while I was still waiting for information from the other clients last week.  I found out that the tax software I am using has a problem with our state and the forms are not fileable (my practice is too small for me to be able file for clients online).  So, I have had to take the copy of the return as I get it from the software and then fill in the state forms by hand to be able to use them.  This did not happen with a return I had to prepare for a different state so it is related to this state's returns not a general problem.  This was not a big deal, but it did take more time.  

I had to send a couple of weeks ago emails to both organizations for renewals and I am currently waiting for the renewals to trickle in from both groups.  

It doesn't matter how much I have systems for getting things done on time when things go awry elsewhere.  Plus of course – Easter and Passover dinners for husband and myself, as well as husband's birthday.  This is one heck of a spring for me, and I have to work hard to juggle it all this year.  

THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK -

Chances are that whatever one's plans are and how well they are organized something will go wrong.  Hopefully nothing goes wrong in a major way that cannot be adjusted for.  The comedienne Gilda Radner used to say on “Saturday Night Live” - “It's always something.”  

Oh, did I mention that our shower drain is backed up and we cannot use it until we clear the pipes, we still have to figure out what to do about the poison ivy in the backyard that we ignored last year and it grew all the way from the back of the house to the front – including onto the house, and we could not mow the backyard due to same and still have weeds the size of trees back there...