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On Thursday 01 October 2009 12:43:01 Richard Wiggins wrote: > A couple things happened at the same time in the last couple of days. I > desperately needed to communicate with MSU HR using an msu.edu address, and > WIlliam Safire died. > > 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 > mail.msu.edu. Since mail.msu.edu is amateur, MSU needs to make it easy to > forward to a professional service. > > I literally spent an hour trying to figure out how to set forwarding in the > new mail.msu.edu interface. I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, > but I could not discern how to accomplish a simple task that MSU requires > thousands to complete. > > When I wrote MSU's first e-mail system in 1983, it was state of the art. > That's because there was no art. It was primitive. We had no clue. That > was 1983. It is 2009. We should be smarter now. I wasn't around when MSU > chose its current e-mail system. But to bury a vital function such as > forwarding -- which is now an essential thinig, which MSU demands -- under > an obscure tab labeled "MSU Prefs"-- this is not just primitive. It is > incompetent. > > It also took more than 24 hours for my former colleagues at ATS to cough up > simple information vital to me -- how do I set forwarding in this poor > interface. We were better at FAQs in 1957 than we are in 2009. My > colleagues are good people but the standard of service is poor. Questions > should be answered in minutes, not days. And if the primary campus e-mail > service hides forwarding under a label of "MSU Prefs" given a ribbon bar of > normal options for the app, there is a problem. > > http://wigblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/when-william-safire-quoted-me-on-e-mail >.html Rich, I think you are mixing two things up, which is the mail transport system and the front end. I rarely use the front end web system, so I use the mail.msu.edu as a server via tls pop. That forwarding is controlled by something in a preferences section should not be surprising. I agree it could be better worded, but I am not one of those who decry the web system, as I have pointed people to it, and by and large they go away and don't ask for help. This is always a good sign for me, because I have people who aren't afraid to yelp when things go wonky. The back end of the system isn't bad. Yes, there are hiccups, and I suspect that I have lost a few peices of mail. Worse the spam system has caught several mailing list items which were not spam, but I haven't tried teaching the system what is real email, so I will defer comments about the spam system till I've done more. The mail system itself has been reliable. I have run sendmail/exim systems and MSU's email is definitely decent. The problem with running any mail system today is the soul-sucking bone-crushing amount of spam that a system needs to deal with. Even the processor power of mail machines needs to be up there, because of all the garbage that needs to be done to deal with spam. Thus I'd have to say that MSU's system is not amateur. It might have room for improvement, but I wonder how much of the problems it has are related to money. --STeve Andre'