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Rich,

>Increasingly MSU treats e-mail as official.  It's really important 
>to be able to forward your MSU e-mail to a professional service, as 
>opposed to <http://mail.msu.edu>mail.msu.edu.  Since 
><http://mail.msu.edu>mail.msu.edu is amateur, MSU needs to make it 
>easy to forward to a professional service.

As a fan of William Safire, you will appreciate that both MSU's and 
Google's e-mail services, by definition, are "professional" in the 
sense that both are designed and managed by paid staff who might even 
make a living at it.  Oh sure, sense 4 of "professional" in my online 
American Heritage Dictionary does say, "Having or showing great 
skill; expert", but doesn't such usage dilute its main sense and 
divert linguistic fuss-budgets like me from your main point?  If we 
want to deride the design of any e-mail service, perhaps we should 
consult our collective thesauri and pick a more artful term :).

(Oh, and thanks for the link to your blog about your contribution to 
William Safire, I enjoyed that.)

-- David McFarlane, Professional Faultfinder