Tabmail.info – It’s Not Hard!

By Wayne Maruna

Tabmail is the name given to Taberna’s email distribution list, which is closed to the general public and open only to property owners and residents (including renters) of the Taberna development.  I started the list way back in December of 2004.  Over that time we have grown from an original group of twelve pioneers to over 800 subscribers today.

One of the missions of Tabmail is to inform, so it was not long before early subscribers were reaching out to others on the list looking for recommendations for tradesmen like plumbers, painters, and pressure washers (the 3 Ps who are the subject of the most common inquiries.)  This was nice to see at first, but after about the 35^th inquiry about plumbers, it was starting to get old.  So I decided to create a webpage where I would collect the most frequent responses for the most frequent solicitations and add to them over time.  Ah, what to call the page?  Something memorable, right?  I decided on www.tabmail.info because we were, after all, Tabmail, and what we were sharing was info.  (Plus, at the time, believe it or not, tabmail.com was already taken and not by me.) 

Well it turns out that www.tabmail.info was not as memorable as I thought.  Fourteen years later, one of the most often asked questions on Tabmail is still “Can someone recommend a plumber”, never mind the fact that there are five plumbers listed on Tabmail.info, along with nine pressure washers and two dozen painters, along with a host of others from pet sitters to piano tuners, and even services that don’t start with P.  Now I understand that water is necessary for life, so perhaps it is no surprise that there are so many inquiries about plumbers, but I have to tell you that my forehead is flattening out from all the face smacks I do when I see another plumber question posted.  Clearly some people won’t make the effort to write down the simple website www.tabmail.info and instead prefer to rely on the other 799 people on the email list to answer yet another oft-repeated question. Think about that for a minute.  Each time you send an email through Tabmail, you are causing 799 other people do something with your email, even if it is just deleting it.  Not far behind the plumber question is “what is the website where we can look up recommended service people”?  ARGHH!.  I simply refuse to answer that question anymore.  Fortunately for the curious and the new enrollees, my neighbor across the street usually responds. Bear in mind that the guidelines I send to every new subscriber include information on the use of (say it together): www.tabmail.info. If you can’t be bothered to write the address on a sticky note, may I suggest a tattoo on the wrist? That way when you’re scratching your head thinking about the web address, well, there it will be!

So be nice to the other 799 people on the list and don’t send out a service inquiry without first going to www.tabmail.info and checking the contents there.  As in the yellow pages, you may need to look in more than one place to find what you are looking for, e.g. Carpenters, Construction, General Contracting, Handyman, Remodeling, Renovation.  The good news is that plumbers are only listed as plumbers.

www.tabmail.info will give you the option to go to the page with the larger group of Recommended Providers, or you can also elect to go to Neighborhood Providers which will show you business cards for Taberna Residents.  You can be a good neighbor by considering those first.