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A Diploma and an Email Account for Life
ackthpt writes "Graduate college and you may gain an email address for life. This story in the Associated Press Get that ordinary 'grad' email or get the prestige of 'alumni' email address. Great for keeping in touch with your college buds, or "Schools can also be sure they'll get the latest e-mail addresses of their alums to send newsletters, invitations to events, perhaps even pitches for financial gifts." That 'financial gifts' is probably the kicker, after working with a 'college development office' for years, I learned how valuable it can be to shorten the distance it takes to reach out and touch someone. Of course, there's still the anonymity of that old ivy-covered-standby, Hotmail.U ;-)" Plus if you don't like your fellow grads, its easier to mass filter!
Too bad they still don't get a life...
I graduated from University of California, Davis in the early 1990s, and had been using email for some five years up to that point. It was clear then that email was a preferred mode of communications, and it's only become more so.
I've been long stunned at the absolute lack of clue universities have had in not picking this up as a standard service. They already run services for thousands (or tens of thousands) of students, faculty, staff, and associated personnel. Keeping mail services open for alums wouldn't be much of an additional load, and, as a channel for communications and alumni donations, it should pay for itself many times over. Exceedingly short-sighted IMO.
And, no the Cal Aggie Alumni Association still lacks clue.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
The direct benefit for the university is the income it can derive from alumni donations and through its marketing efforts. If the university abuses its resource to the point that alums desert it, they've managed it poorly.
If the service is implemented as a forwarder (common with other systems, such as the ACM/IEEE email systems), users are free to apply their own spam blocks to the service.
I'd expect the best option to be posting a periodic (monthly/quarterly) newsletter to recipients, selling sponsorship spots in this medium.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
I have been using my main email address since the fall of 1993 . My email address is listed on several web sites that I run, and has been posted, unchanged, to Usenet over 2000 times in the 7.5 years.
/. with my email address unchanged.
I have been on a couple dozen mailing lists, both commercial and hand-run over the years. I am still on about 5 different commerial mailing lists set up by companies to announce things. For about a year, I replied to most spam that I got, complaining and asking to be removed.
I even post to
To date, I do not run any major SPAM filters and only get about 4-5 spams a week. I simply trash them anymore, figuring that if I kept replying I would only get more.
Perhaps that is the way to avoid SPAM. Perhaps spammers remove your email address after a certain amount of time, figuring that there is no way anyone would ever keep their email address more than five years...
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
IEEE and ACM have been around for decades. How long has gandi.net been around?
I think it's better to get your lifetime email address from somewhere like computer.org, ieee.org, acm.org, or your preferred professional society.
Personally, I do not trust my financial institution^W^Wcollege to maintain my email address for years without constant donations. Even then, I find it likely that they'd drop it if they decided it wasn't worth the cash. With a professional institution, you have an instition usually far less financially driven than a university. You are paying yearly dues, but you're getting specific benefits for those, instead of lining the chancellor's bowling alley.
Frankly stable addresses are a great thing, too often they turn over, become difficult to track, etc.
Since most degree-granting instutions are more stable them most dotcoms this is an appreciated service. In return for the occasionial spam from the school one gets a stable address.
The accounts aren't forced on anyone, they're a voluntary sign up folks are free to take advantage of. They're usually not real accounts either but rather fowarding services, thus there's no storage-space or connectivity issues.
Send mail to bubba@alum.beerdrinker.edu and it'll automagically get redirected to beerswiller@hotmail.com. Should Bubba decide to change to AOL our hypothetical graduate need only update the service at alum.beerdrinker.edu in order to get all of his email now forwarded to idrinkspud@aol.com, no need to mass-email all of his drinking buddies.
Once the email is forwarded one is of course free to treat it as any other email: filter-to-death, file-and-ignore, whatever. want to kill it completely? Then just cancel the service or redirect it to a dead account.
ps Other places offer like services, off the top of my head I can think of the Association for Computing Machinery & bigfoot.com. One is presumably around for the long-term, the other, well we'll see how their business model works out...
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
and get all the email addresses you want for life...
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enterfornone - logging in for a change
You must be getting filtered by your provider. My circumstances are extremely similar to yours; I get a dozen or two spam a day, depending on how successful the latest "get 10bijillion email addresses free" campaign is.
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
I've had a net email address since 1986,
had three major jobs in that time,
and seen bboards & ISPs rise and drop like flies.
An alumni organization is probably as stable as
anything else- one school been around since 1865
the other 1889. Funny, I don't use the two email-
addresses-for-life I got from them yet.
Least they could do was give you a shell account or dialup....
And risk a rogue hacker like Kevin Mitnick causing $200 billion in damages??
My alumni account is where 90% of all my UCE spam comes in--I don't know whether my alum organization sold their list (they do like money) or if it was through other means. Not to mention it is where 100% of my "join the alumni association!" "travel with ex-Greeks, drunkenly piss on the seven wonders of the world!" offers come through.
Mmmmmmmmm. procmailicious.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
cantab.net is a great example of a hideously implemented system. Every student at Cambridge has a unique identifier used for their email address, and all hell would break loose if any of these were ever reused. However, there is no official commitment to not reusing these identifiers and as a result a completely different local part is used for the address. This wouldn't be so bad, except that they've chosen
inital.surname.yearofentry
Namespace collisions? What namespace collisions?
Thank God the university development office don't run the university mail servers.
I've had 3 "lifetime" email addresses disapear thanks to the internet-advertising downturn, DoS attacks, etc.
I ended up buying a domain name, it's the only way to be remotely near sure.
On top of that, you can trace where spam/junk mailers got your address from, (enrole as slashdot@banksian.co.uk per se.)
Arrogance is a risk; Harvard grads (for example) rarely state they went to Harvard unless pressed, asked, or it's on a resume, for just that reason. But there are times when it really does help. I never use my alumni e-mail (which does just forward to my regular e-mail) unless I'm applying for a job, but you can bet that when they see that address on a resume, they skip actually calling the school to see if I went there.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
But the kicker about having several is that you can give out different e-mail addresses based on the role you're playing in that situation. An e-mail address is more than characters strung together, it is an identity, and often an affiliation with some organization.
For instance:
The fact that they all go the exact same place doesn't matter. They might not always. I might decide at some point to sort them differently or give them different priorities based on who the "To:" address in the headers is. If for some reason I cease to become a Debian maintainer in the future, I should no longer get Debian-related mail, and I could set up an auto-responder to indicate that I am no longer affiliated with the project.
So even though it may seem like just another forwarding e-mail address, I think that each one that captures a different capacity you serve is useful.
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My college gave me a shell account and dialup # I could use after I left.
Then what about policies for dormant accounts? Do they get deleted after a while? Do you expire messages not read for x number of years?
It's a fairly good idea, but how's this? Give them a choice. Provide an actual INBOX for life or give them an easy way to forward that e-mail to their preferred mail address. But in either case, it should be something the student chooses. Let them know the service exists, but if they don't sign up for it, can it.
how do I enroll at www.root.edu in order to graduate and get an account there? As a self professed geek I think I would stand to make more money, and look pimped out when I'm interviewed at at Fortune 500 co leading to a billion (rips Austin Powers) ... million dollar salary.
SpeedyGrl
Want Root?
For those of you who aren't in the know, stolaf.edu and luther.edu are rivals of sorts. It's generally a good natured thing, even if those Minnesota people are snobs.
________________________
I don't want free as in beer. I just want free beer.
And maybe Cornell is filtering spam and you don't know it. Lots of ISPs do that without telling their clients, it isn't a far stretch for campus IT departments to do the same.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Either that or it'll be that much easier to make people think you went to University :)
You'd be darn upset if all of a sudden your name and email address were splattered all over the place if what you really wanted was to be left alone! And what about those psychotic classmates you always wanted to get away from? Hey if you want to "take advantage" of this email service, you've also got to put up them knowing how to get ahold of you. Granted, you can decide to not use the address just like you can decide to not list your phone number in the phone book, but the difference here is that you are denied the use of soemthing that might in some cases make the difference between getting a job or not.
After paying upwards of 50 or 60K for an education that's all you get? A lousy friggin email address?
Least they could do was give you a shell account or dialup....
You're a college grad out on there own. You probably don't have an ISP: you don't even have a house/apartment yet and you've been an ethernet junkie for 4 years. Work? Soon, but not just yet. And who the hell uses an internet email address if you get your mail from campus servers quick and easy.
I personaly would trust my school with my mail much more than the other three any way
"You saved 1968." - Ms. Valerie Pringle to the crew of Apollo 8
Just because it is accepted that the masculine gender takes precedence over the feminine in a mixed group doesn't make it right--see the numorous essays in which "she" is arbitrarily being substituted for "he" where a non-gender-specific pronoun is needed.
And fuck you, that was not a troll.
Karma: Bored. (Thinking about resurrecting the "Anyone else is an imposter" joke.)
ALL [ save for class mailing lists ] of my mail gets forwarded to that school account via Yahoo forwarding or, lately, via my own domain.
Therefore, the only thing i'd want from my grad school is to let me keep that UNIX account, but they would most assuredly fail to do so - CS department will cancel the account when I leave.
Now, the upsides of having them forward to <myname>@alum.<myschool>.edu would be:
Downsides:
All in all, unless you're in MIT or a fanatic of your institution for life, I see no reason to bother with one.
If they, on the other hand, offered a long-term (not even permanent) UNIX-based mail account, i'd even agree to pay some monthly/yearly fee for it. Probably on a separate server if enough people sign up, so it doesn't take CPU/memory resources from real students.
<Dennis Miller>But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.</Dennis Miller>
-DVK
"The right to figure things out for yourself is the only true freedom everyone shares. Go use it"-R.A.Heinlein
And save tons of dollars on postage :P
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
Oh, that's right, science will save us with the development of a magic spam filter that is 100% efficient.
Most students don't seem to feel drawn to keeping in touch with their alma mater. Many do, of course, but it still appears that the majority get out, get a job, get a life, and don't look back -- and as we had a history of high levels of state funding until recently, there was no tradition of post-graduation donation to act as a spur. We'd like to offer it, but we need to do some cultural re-education first.
///Peter
"My son went all the way to Cambridge and all he got was this lousy email address!"
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Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
I remember this was suggested a couple of years ago. It would make a lot of sense - for once there would be a centralized email directory, not unlike the phone book. If only this had been done before the introduction of Internet to the masses.
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Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Considering most state schools get free postage, isn't this the same thing anyway?
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
"Alumni" is the correct form of the mixed gender plural. "Alumnae" would only be used at all-female schools.
I remember the old days when it was un-heard-of to put an email address on a business card. That was back when the most pretentious thing you could do was wear an ivy league college tie. Needing a more arogant thing to do, I guess now ivy league grads can put their ivy league email address on their business card. Just wait. Some resourceful student at havard, MIT or Princeton will setup their own host 'alumni.mit.edu' or whatever similar hostname isn't already in use, and sell addresses to those of us who wish we had attended institution X.
Never mind the obvious, that it'd be illegal to sell university bandwidth, as a stdent there, you could pay your way through school selling addresses.
But in all seriousness, it's nise to see that there's yet another opportunity for pretentiousness and college snobbery made possible through the wonders if the internet
--CTH
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--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
I like this idea.
But then again I would like them to throw in the Alpha Sorority.
Are you on the Sfglj (SF-Goth EMail Junkies List) ?
"Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness." - M
I would recommend against using those E-mail addresses: they are tied to continued membership in those organizations, and you may at some point decide to leave them. After all, membership is expensive, benefits are minimal, and the organizations may take political positions that you disagree with.
The IEEE was particularly bad: when I renewed late one year, they immediately reassigned my E-mail address to someone else and didn't give it back. Any well-run organization should at least have a non-trivial exclusionary period during which an address can't be reassigned; anything else is a security problem. I also found IEEE customer support in general pretty slow and unsatisfactory, and the E-mail forwarding was unreliable anyway when I first got it (maybe they have fixed it by now).