Learning Curves

Recently, I migrated my professional email address from the WebMail that the university has been providing to a Google-powered one. The thing is, the university is subsidizing its email services to Google starting from this year, and it is effective to freshmen this year, and also alumni who graduated from June 2009 onwards. The good thing about this is that people who fall into this bracket can make use of the various nice applications that GoogleMail has, instead of having to rely on the archaic WebMail system that until now has been used by the university. It also frees the university's server, since the email will not be in the university's webspace, but in Google.

So, I happen to fall into the bracket that is eligible for migration. I am not a freshman, but since I applied to graduate for my master's degree back in June, even though I am not yet done with my PhD degree, technically, I am an alumnus of this university. So I applied for migration, which now allows me to use my professional email address forever. I don't have to worry that I only have six months to use my email address once I terminate my academic connections with this institution. So, even if I graduate and leave Buffalo, I can still use this address, which is very neat. That means that the email address that I have on the publications that I have released while affiliated with this institution can still be received, and all I have to do is set a forwarding scheme to the current email address that I have. No worries.

So for the past few days, I have been learning the ins and outs of GoogleMail. It's very neat: it allows me to put mountain pictures in my Inbox. It also keeps track of the emails as conversations. I definitely like that. That avoids the need to go back and forth the SentMail and Inbox folders to see how the conversation proceeded. Why did I not shift from Yahoo! Mail to GoogleMail before? Perhaps, because I can still see how Yahoo! Mail was useful to me. Besides, that is the email address that my friends know. Anyway, if there is a need to make a rather more professional email address than the one I have in Yahoo! then I will make one, not in Yahoo! But in Google this time.



(Persian Statue, from my DC Buildings Series)