I've not had a single e-mail from anyone for 4 days, meaning that I've lost a valuable source of procrastination. No spam, no adds - nothing. In the history of my PhD this is unprecedented. Out of the 7 billion people that inhabit this planet, I feel like I've disappeared. I know for some people this would be heaven, but I miss my e-mails. I may have to sign up for dubious offers on the internet to keep my inbox active. Is anyone else experiencing this strange, pointless and insignificant phenomenon?

I've had similar, although a constant flow of students asking for statistics help, which I have managed to ignore so far. I probably should answer them....(sprout)

I have three email accounts. This increases procrastination time as I have to check them all! They have all been getting about the same level of emails (particlarly spam, or messages from things I might have signed up for year ago but now just delete them unread). My uni email has been very very quiet. In fact I have received one email today!

If you have your account set up so you are emailed whn someone responds on here then you should be getting an email any time soon (or it will hve arrived by the time you see this!)

Ah ha! Great idea, Catlinbond. I'll be spoilt for e-mail procrastination choice if I set my PGF account to send me notification e-mails when threads are responded to. I'm also experimenting with those RSS feeds for Outlook so that I can also be distracted by the World's latest news 24/7. Hopefully things will pick up in a week or two when my supervisor gets back from holiday and starts to ask where my work is.

Just to add, I used to have a Hotmail account but they're not very good at dealing with spam. I've had e-mails relating to everything from winning the internet lottery, to winning the Dutch lottery and the 'people's lottery'. So, I just use a G-mail account now.

Wal - if you actually PLAY those lotteries, you need to go and find those emails! and then split the profits with me :-)

Obviously, Sneaks, if I'd won all those lotteries, I'd split the winnings with everyone on here. I don't know whether its because my PhD made me a cynic, but there's just this slight nagging at the back of my mind about it all... Maybe it's because all the phone numbers are South African, no matter which lottery I've won. Or maybe it's because all the lottery correspondents have names like James Peter, Smith Andrew and the like. There's just something which stops me from photocopying my passport and bank details and e-mailing it to them. It doesn't matter though because I'm pretty certain I'll win next week and the week after that. So we're all going to be millionaires!

And just this minute, I've received an e-mail! It's from Lucie...at laterooms.com!

I got a bit glum 10 days ago, when I'd had no emails for a while...turns out a trojan virus had gobbled my entire inbox, but at least I had a legitimate reason to be fully distracted for a while.

The way the stars thing works is if you have a thread and someone leaves a useful comment, you click on the helpful user button. Unfortunately, you can only vote someone a helpful user once. It's very easy to get one star and increasingly hard to get further stars, so four or five stars requires a lot of votes. Just between you and me, I actually think it's impossible to get five because I've been on this forum for around three years (the course of my PhD) and I have never seen a single person with five stars - other than the admins that is (who seem to be able to award themselves five stars at the click of a button). Not that I harbour seething, childish resentment at never having been able to get 5 stars or anything :$

Don't worry Wal, I'm with you there. Maybe the newbies can all start threads specifically to give us star votes and see if 5 is indeed unattainable. All in the name of research of course, not because I want 5 stars or anything :$

Although, if I finish my PhD without 5 stars, I will feel a deep lack of accomplishment.

I was very excited to log on one day and discover my second star! Must have been helpful at some point. Anyway think they need to advertise them a bit better as I had no idea what the stars were and hence no idea I could award them to helpful people.

Back to emails I have a hotmail account but have it set uo so anything not from a contact goes to junk mail. Means I occasionally miss something but I don't get all the "buy our cheap drugs" and "enhance the size of your manhood" (I'm a woman :-s) emails bothering me.