Rich,
Are you no longer at ATS? The MSU directory still lists you there.
I'm somewhat surprised to see this email, for a variety of reasons.
You gave me an invite to Gmail a long time ago (perhaps the first year it was in "beta"). I created an account, but don't actively use it. Halfway between then and now, I gave an invite to a current MSU student. For about a year, he would access the account, change the password, test it, and an hour later it would revert to the original password. Could never raise any interest from the Google professionals to investigate.
I prefer to use msu.edu via IMAP. But I did just use the web interface for a small task last night, and it worked fine.
Now I appreciate that you work at a higher level than us in-the-trenches people, and truly look forward to your observations. When I'm working on a computer problem, I might try to look at the documentation first. After two minutes, I slap myself and say "that is the old way". Then I flip over to a search engine for the answer. If you go to
www.msu.edu and type "forward email", you get one good result. The first line of that document says to go into Prefs.
If the search engine doesn't work, I resort to phone-a-friend.
-John
On Oct 1, 2009, at 12:43 PM, 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.
