I hope to be getting back to blogging after a week of vacation followed by a series of annoying computing woes. First my router went down at home. Then I went to school to discover that the College has been messing with the email. Apparently on August 12th they decided to stop POP and IMAP from working the way it had in the past. I thought I was accessing my Cortland email through my gmail. As I was away most of that time and checking email on my iphone I just didn’t notice that the Cortland stuff wasn’t coming through. Missing those emails was a pain. One of my colleagues stopped me in the hall and asked if I was angry with her b/c I hadn’t responded to her email. Plus there was a number of student emails I missed.
But the real pain is how I am going to move forward at this point. The college made this change for security purposes, specifically problems with phishing and spam. I understand that. I get 50-100 emails a day, sometimes more, but that’s a good average. My gmail also catches around 50 spam messages a day (plus about another 100 more through kpraxis email, that thing is ridiculous!). But they all go into the spam filter. I never see them unless I want to. It’s pretty rare for them to get through.
So anyway, I’ve got an idea about how to get rid of spam. We can just stop using the internet. Or at least email. Short of that, we can try to tie it down so much as to make it basically unusable anyway. The trick is to find the balance, I suppose.
So here is what Cortland has left me. I could access my account through webmail. But the webmail is horrible on a Mac. You can’t search. You can’t filter messages. It’s just a big pile of messages. Worthless.
I could use VPN and Apple Mail. The thing is, I don’t really care for Apple Mail. Plus having to get in through VPN is just an additional hassle.
Then there’s the matter of access via my iPhone. You can set up VPN on your iphone, so maybe that’s a possibility. Again though, this all just seems like an unnecessary hassle when I can choose from any number of free e-mail services like gmail.
What possible reason could there be for using my Cortland email?
So my solution is to just use Gmail. Maybe I’ll set up a second Gmail account for personal use. That’s not a problem. I’ve already informed my students and advisees of my gmail address. And I’ve changed my contact e-mail in the college’s information system.
Alex Reid 