Tonight I have been dragged kicking and screaming to a new age.
My Cornell webmail account has shut me out. Actually, it has not quite shut me out but was building up the pressure toward the inevitable so I decided to take the leap rather than suffer slowly. SB was patted on the back, locked out, and sent away with well wishes when he finished his MBA in 2006 but I somehow slipped through the cracks, perhaps because I began to work there after graduation and my profile changed. I have been happily using my NetID for years.
Cornell's webmail was a bulky and painful system when I first was given an account. It had some interesting quirks such as the fact that if you did not save your e-mail every 30 minutes, it would fail to reload when you hit the "send" button and you would lose everything that you forgot to save. Now I know some of you are wondering why this would be a problem. Who writes 30 minute long e-mails? Well let me tell you who: a lot of Cornell graduate students. Perhaps the automatic 30 minute e-mail dump is a good for those of us who were sending long rants or drunken confessions (I was once on the receiving end of a long winded sexual confession from an undergraduate who am fairly certain I have never spoken to, who awkwardly was also the daughter of my thesis advisor). Much like the Gmail application to put an automatic hold on e-mails sent at certain hours of the night, the 30 minute dump may have saved a lot of people from a lot of embarrassment. But for me it was horrifying, infuriating, and depressing. Lost e-mails include a message describing my arrival in Ithaca, with its deep gorges and lush forests. I didn't have it in me to rewrite the letter so my family and friends got instead, "I arrived. It's nice." I also lost various academic tidbits and citations that I had pasted into e-mails for filing and forgot to send immediately. By the way, e-mail is one of my favorite ways to file things. I just send receipts, documents, etc to myself and put them into tidy, little electronic folders.
So yes, webmail was not always good to me and was painfully limited in options but I was used to it. Then Cornell went and upgraded to a different system. I was sent an invitation to move along last month which was duly noted and ignored. Then I got a friendly reminder to do it because they were ending webmail soon. Last week I got an e-mail telling me that I could still log in to webmail but could not yse any of the send/reply functions. I saw the writing on the wall.
I sucked it up and logged onto the upgrade page expecting a long process but I was transferred somewhat painlessly, with the only difficulty being that I had to log onto two different sites to verify my status.
Today I logged into the new site and it was a noticeable improvement. I was even able to forward my account to Gmail, which I previously could not do. Upon doing so I wondered if after all these years I would finally be able to send on my hotmail account also. The answer was yes. Yes! So here I am, like a brand new person basking in my good fortune. Tomorrow I am going to buy my first touch-screen phone. I have been inspired by my new e-mail option...and the fact that the old phone died on Friday and I may want to check my messages sometime soon.
My Cornell webmail account has shut me out. Actually, it has not quite shut me out but was building up the pressure toward the inevitable so I decided to take the leap rather than suffer slowly. SB was patted on the back, locked out, and sent away with well wishes when he finished his MBA in 2006 but I somehow slipped through the cracks, perhaps because I began to work there after graduation and my profile changed. I have been happily using my NetID for years.
Cornell's webmail was a bulky and painful system when I first was given an account. It had some interesting quirks such as the fact that if you did not save your e-mail every 30 minutes, it would fail to reload when you hit the "send" button and you would lose everything that you forgot to save. Now I know some of you are wondering why this would be a problem. Who writes 30 minute long e-mails? Well let me tell you who: a lot of Cornell graduate students. Perhaps the automatic 30 minute e-mail dump is a good for those of us who were sending long rants or drunken confessions (I was once on the receiving end of a long winded sexual confession from an undergraduate who am fairly certain I have never spoken to, who awkwardly was also the daughter of my thesis advisor). Much like the Gmail application to put an automatic hold on e-mails sent at certain hours of the night, the 30 minute dump may have saved a lot of people from a lot of embarrassment. But for me it was horrifying, infuriating, and depressing. Lost e-mails include a message describing my arrival in Ithaca, with its deep gorges and lush forests. I didn't have it in me to rewrite the letter so my family and friends got instead, "I arrived. It's nice." I also lost various academic tidbits and citations that I had pasted into e-mails for filing and forgot to send immediately. By the way, e-mail is one of my favorite ways to file things. I just send receipts, documents, etc to myself and put them into tidy, little electronic folders.
So yes, webmail was not always good to me and was painfully limited in options but I was used to it. Then Cornell went and upgraded to a different system. I was sent an invitation to move along last month which was duly noted and ignored. Then I got a friendly reminder to do it because they were ending webmail soon. Last week I got an e-mail telling me that I could still log in to webmail but could not yse any of the send/reply functions. I saw the writing on the wall.
I sucked it up and logged onto the upgrade page expecting a long process but I was transferred somewhat painlessly, with the only difficulty being that I had to log onto two different sites to verify my status.
Today I logged into the new site and it was a noticeable improvement. I was even able to forward my account to Gmail, which I previously could not do. Upon doing so I wondered if after all these years I would finally be able to send on my hotmail account also. The answer was yes. Yes! So here I am, like a brand new person basking in my good fortune. Tomorrow I am going to buy my first touch-screen phone. I have been inspired by my new e-mail option...and the fact that the old phone died on Friday and I may want to check my messages sometime soon.
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