To the Editor:
So it seems that the RPI community is getting @RPINet, “a fully integrated, user-friendly alumni Web community.” I’ll admit that I don’t read every square inch of every Rensselaer magazine that comes out, so this was news to me. But the way in which I discovered it is a problem. See, I use a POP3 access to download my e-mail because, simply put, it’s faster to move the 1’s and 0’s in bulk then to have all of the handshaking of HTTP transfers the size of individual e-mails. Not to mention, when I’m off-line working on the laptop, I can easily read the e-mails that I’ve downloaded! So, when the POP3 access portals are being played with, I am forced to log in via the web login and, lo and behold, there’s an important notification about @RPINet.
Something very similar happened when the e-mail was first outsourced to Mail2World. The POP3 needed changing, and I learned about it after two days of wondering why my email client wouldn’t interface the system. I thought that I had been virused really well until I happened to discover at the web interface that the system had changed with only a passive notification to be discovered by us POP3 users and Arthur Dent fans.
So does this make sense? Not at all. Here’s a customer who regularly uses the POP3 interface to retrieve his e-mail who has never received timely e-mail notification that the POP3 interface soon wouldn’t work, and who wouldn’t discover it until it didn’t work. Twice. And I bet that I’m not alone at being disenfranchised this way.
Then there’s the related issue of e-mail for life. Maybe I was asleep at the reality wheel again, but wasn’t the original concept a free e-mail service for life? After paying well over $100,000 to get two degrees from RPI, these animal farm service providers are changing the rules on me. Let’s see, RPI receives millions of dollars in donations, but over the span of my predicted longevity, I need to fork over a petty, yet critical annual $14.95 to make this service work. Maybe the nominal fee is to pay to outsource the thinking necessary to come up with the idea that the customer should be sent an timely e-mail notification about upcoming email service changes. Whoa—what a simple solution.
Psst! Make it policy not to ire the customers who so soon will be asked to start paying for services that were once free “for life” and maybe they won’t mind so much when it comes time to run a capital campaign.
(Disclaimer: this nominal fee really has nothing to do with President Jackson’s recently announced $1 billion capital campaign to help the campus endowment and infrastructure. Don’t connect my concerns with your potential donation to the school. If you we planning on sending $1000, don’t dare send only $985.05 this year in protest. And certainly don’t let others in your class do that either. In fact, don’t even e-mail them the idea - especially if they’re trying to use POP3 this week.)
Jason Mutford
Alumnus
