Unreliable service pisses me off!

I have been using Yahoo! Groups since it was still eGroups. In fact, with the mailing lists that I have created and managed, I even had the opportunity to earn some money off of it – thanks, eGroups!

Anyway, it comes as a natural transition that the same services will be used for my classes in the university. Although there is the UVLE, I still find Yahoo! Groups sufficient for my needs. However, to make sure that members of my lists are from the University, I made it my policy to require subscribers to use their University e-mail addresses — even to the point of having them sign-up and activate it. Believe me, my students in 2001 did not even have active University e-mail accounts until they enrolled in my class. They all use either yahoo or hotmail (yuck!).

This semester, however, I am starting to regret having this policy. The effort of having my students’ accounts reactivated every so often is taking its toll. Mailing list messages are all bouncing back to the Yahoo! Groups servers! Now students have an excuse of not being able to read my announcements and other instructions on time!

It has reached a point wherein I no longer use the University’s e-mail services as my primary e-mail account because it is unreliable! E-mail sent to that address gets forwarded automatically – not without delay, of course!

I know some of the reasons behind these problems but I just cannot figure out why it has not been a priority. New servers and more storage space are available – it is just a matter of making it priority! I know that someone is in-charge of it but how can he/she work on it if there are other tasks assigned to him/her? Pull him/her out of his/her current assignments and make him/her devote all his/her time attending to these critical services – but that is just me… I don’t exactly know what is happening behind the scenes, of course.

One thing is true, though. Do not rely on your company or school e-mail services unless you plan on staying there forever. I am glad that I have other more prestigious forwarding addresses from IEEE and ACM. Heck, I even have my e-mail address from the University of Leeds! Make them all point to your Gmail account and you have 2GB (and rapidly increasing) of e-mail space for free. I also have my .Mac paid subscription in addition to the above.