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A Diploma and an Email Account for Life

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the bouncy-bouncy-bouncy dept.

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!

10 of 112 comments (clear)

  1. Re:At Stanford... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3
    CS majors not only get a lifetime email address

    Too bad they still don't get a life...

  2. Really, this should be a *duh* by Masem · · Score: 3
    Email addresses are ubiquitous as your normal snail mail addresses when it comes to people contacting you, and with people moving in and out of workplaces, ISPs, and schools with much more frequency, email addresses could change at a drop of the hat. Fortunately, it's very easy for most standard mail servers to alias ex-employees or students to point at some other site of the person's wishes. All they need is to edit a line in a alias file (assuming you're dealing with standard mail servers). Yet most places don't offer this; once you are gone, your mail account is gone, and if you had used it for any significant correspodence, you're screwed. Sure, most of us on /. will have our own private mailbox that we use for our correspodence and use the work/school provided one only for that purpose, but 99% of computer users aren't like us.

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  3. Better options by Alan+Shutko · · Score: 3

    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.

  4. Re:that's it?! by SimplyCosmic · · Score: 5
    Well, I've always looked at it as paying $14,000 for an ethernet internet connection, and getting an education thrown in for free.

  5. Privacy rights by BierGuzzl · · Score: 3

    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.

  6. that's it?! by Arctic+Fox · · Score: 5

    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....

  7. What other account? by Mateorabi · · Score: 4

    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

    --
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  8. Great,your alma mater can spam you for donations by efuseekay · · Score: 3

    And save tons of dollars on postage :P

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  9. a bad idea by fleener · · Score: 3
    A lifetime e-mail address (or forwarding address) is simply a bad idea. Think about how many marketing databases you get listed in over just a couple years, and how much spam that translates into. Now think how much spam you'll be getting 50 years from now using the same address. Well, ok, /.ers guardedly use their addresses, but the average person uses their address with reckless abandon.

    Oh, that's right, science will save us with the development of a magic spam filter that is 100% efficient.

  10. don't get IEEE addresses by janpod66 · · Score: 3
    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.

    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).