The perils of auto-posting everywhere - you have been warned

Firstly I am a huge fan of Posterous so this post is not in anyway agin them. Moreover is is a heads-up warning to others, like me, who are dabling with a multitude of broadcast and micro-blogging tools; and really enjoying how they all 'talk' to each other.

 But here's the scenario (true story) whilst on a trip to LA I set-up my e-mail auto-notification (hands up who has already jumped to the punch line) and, yup you guessed it, I posted to Posterous (using the post@posterous.com) address. This then triggered a game of ping-pong between Posterous and my mail server; as Posterous mailed me back with a note letting me know my post has published successfully - which got my out office message - which appeared as a new post - which begot a message from Posterous - loop (50 got to 10 springs to mind).

 Worse still each post informed Twitter and my other blog (miles of marketing) and my Tumblr play space.

 By the time I deleted my linked accounts on Posterous and logged in and turned off my auto notification I had received over 200 e-mails, 200 posts, approx 50 twitters etc.

 Fortunately I mailed the guys at Posterous and my thanks goes to Sachin (Co-Founder) for his immediate assistance - who deleted all the erroneous posts, in a flash - and is I am sure going to put safe guards in place to stop this happening again. My concern is I could have just as easily posted from my iPhone without having all my passwords to hand and this would have caused havoc. As it is I had to spend a few hours deleting tweets, and posts.

 I am sure to the tech savvy this gets a sigh but to those, like me, simply trying to use this wonderfully simple technology be aware of the infinite loop possibilities when autoposting.

 To see what other mishaps and chaos I create you should follow me on twitter @mylesdavidson (http://www.twitter.com/mylesdavidson)

Posted via email from mylesdavidson's posterous