My University just made a monumental change over the weekend in abandoning their email system for a partnership with Google’s Gmail. Instead of the miserly 10 MB of email space we were given from day one of grad school, we’re now allowed 7 GB, a significant increase over the previous technology (implemented in 2003). Unfortuanately, Mac Mail does not want to play nice with the new server, and I can’t download cached emails to my laptop. As such, I have to manually pull up a server, sign into the University’s student service-type program and then click a link just to pull up my email, all which could be avoided by using Mac Mail.
Well…let me back up. It’s not the Mac (or PC’s for that matter) that’s the problem. It is a fact that the University’s IT department hasn’t developed specific instructions on now to sync their student’s Gmail accounts with programs such as Mac Mail or Outlook. This normally wouldn’t be an issue if my email account were, “MrPerfect221@gmail.com,” for example. However, with the change in email came new email addresses that look something like, “MrPerfect221@descriptor.university.com.” So, as I configure my email account on my Mac, it’s not clear if you refer to the SMTP server (in one case) as “gmail.com” or “descriptor.university.com” or some combination of the two or a 4th-20th option that no one knows about (tends to happen more often than not).
Now, combine all of this silliness with my role as an organic chemist and, hopefully, you’ll see the issue unfold. All NMR spectra are immediately forwarded to our University email account. Having “tighter” access to my email now means that my precious data is stored somewhere on this vast planet of ours in a Gmail server instead of in the appendix of my dissertation (where it needs to be).
I’ve also been trading emails with my future employer about the giant packet of info that was sent a few days ago. It’s a pain to stop everything I’m doing every few hours, pull up a browser, sign in and make a few mouse clicks to access my mail, when I could be doing it using my email software. I guess I’m just disappointed that the process isn’t streamlined.
Does anyone have any suggestions?
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3 comments:
Uhh were still in those dark ages, rejoice for the recent advances and complain to IT. Maybe they will do their job..
When I started undergrad I read my e-mail on a mainframe terminal. By the time I finished I was using Eudora on Windows 95 over POP. :)
Gmail has good IMAP support and your university should be able to tell you how to configure it. IMAP should be seamless with Mac Mail.
I went down the whole University IMAP road and received 3 different sets of instructions on how to sync Mac Mail with the new Google account. None of them worked. My wife (also a grad student) had the same problems with Outlook express. I'd be more specific, but the issue infurates me (and I'm in a really good mood now).
We circumvented the whole damn problem by forwarding all mail to alternate Google accounts. I can't wait for my new job with actual, working email.
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