4767 Message, 4765 Unread

I have an email account associated with my webpage, thegio at thegio dot net. It was this address that I gave all my friends from Kazakhstan before I left. Every now and then, my counterpart sends me an email at my gmail account, and she usually complains that I don't write back to my students when they email me. This isn't true -- on the few occasions that I do hear back from my old students, I write them back right away. I always chalked this up to meaningless motherly scolding on the part of my counterpart.

But a little while ago, I noticed that if I sent myself an email to the thegio address, it didn't get forwarded, although I did receive some things from the address, such as gmail news updates. Today I found the problem -- the address has been massively spammed, though I didn't realize it because of gmail's spam filtering. However, short, badly spelled messages from obscure servers -- precisely the sorts of messages I would get from my students -- didn't make the cut. A brief inspection found two messages that from former students that I didn't receive in my gmail account.

So now I basically am going to go through all 4.7 thousand messages and separate the wheat from the viagra by hand. I don't feel that bad about it, though. At least now I know what has been going on and can correct it, and perhaps be in closer touch with my Kazakhstani friends.