Have you emailed me with no reply?

If this has happened, please accept my apology. And please know that I will never deliberately ignore an email from a courteous and sincere person. If you wrote to me, and did not hear back, it was likely to be because I never received your email, or I received it and wrote back, but you never received my reply. This has happened on several occasions. The internet is a wonderful tool, but not always reliable.

In the last couple of years there were times when our email service and website were down, intermittently, and once for almost two weeks. This was due to actions by the hosting service. And there was nothing I could do about it until they fixed their problems. A lot of correspondence was lost, both going out from me and coming to me, during that period.

And there were a few times when I had to deal with email program crashes and hard drive crashes. In one case my hard drive AND back-up drive crashed simultaneously (due to damage by naughty kitties). This resulted in a huge loss of important information (thankfully recoverable, but the process is very very slow). I am still working on recovering archived contact info, emails and other important files from that.

We recently moved to the country, to give our cats (and ourselves) a much healthier and roomier environment. Now we are experiencing the "joys" of satellite internet service. We subscribed to the highest available service in the area, but our bandwidth has been severely limited at times (not how it was represented to us), and customer support has been a lot less communicative and helpful than we anticipated (we will soon have a nice blog detailing our experiences, for the benefit of others). This has caused my incoming and outgoing emails to be greatly delayed. So, until this is remedied, for quicker responses, I recommend calling me, or emailing me your phone number, so I can call you back.

And of course there is human error on my part. Despite my intentions, there have been times when I missed an email and discovered it later in my archives. I receive about 400 emails a day, so for instance, if one was delayed in transit, it can arrive after I have viewed that time period, and hide amongst the ones I already read and saved. I do my best to keep up and double check, though.

So, I urge you to persevere and please write to me again (or call me) if you did not receive a response the first time.

Best regards,
Sabira