The combination of an attempted hack, jacking up my email security, and breaking my usual email reader have lead to a worse-than-usual mess in my email in-box, and I’m implementing a few changes that won’t affect most of you who write to me, but just in case, I’m spreading the word.
You want to email me? You can still use [email protected]. That is the only valid address for most of you.
Some of you occasionally write to my umn.edu address. That one is getting thoroughly locked up: if you send email there, it will automagically be fed into a nuclear furnace and vaporized, unless you are writing to me from another umn.edu address or from a small set of authorized domains (and I won’t tell you what they are). Pretend that email address doesn’t even exist anymore. This has become necessary as essential work and student email has been getting buried under the noise.
I’m actually enjoying the purity and simplicity of that account right now — it’s so clean and manageable!
Purity is good.
Professor, will we need to know what any of these domains are for the test?
Purity Of Email
Peace On Earth
Purity Of Essence
Joe for King!
Yngvi is a louse!
But how will you receive notification that the international atheist movement has been crushed by the pen of Nostradamus?
But but, what about my rights of FREEZE PEACH to point out to you how horrible you are? Sure, I can still still do that at your gmail account, but what if I LIKE clogging up you work account? YOU MUST RESPECT MA AUTHORITEH!!!!!!11!!!!
tmscott @ 3:
Your shiny (and pure) internet is on the way…
Ah, the joys of campus e-mail! Daily warnings that one is approaching the in-box storage limit accompanied by multi-megabyte messages announcing the latest bake sale/ceramics fair/student club day/game rally/study abroad opportunity/retirement party. And then there are students who decline to check their campus e-mail and never get around to setting up the forwarding option to direct the e-mail to their preferred personal account: “What? I didn’t know you changed the assignment! Why didn’t you tell me?” [Hint: Come to class or read your e-mail.] And — best of all! — angry e-mails asking to be removed from mass-mailed rants, always sent via “Reply to All” instead of to the original perpetrator. I call it “chain-reaction mail.”
Sounds so much better than “will be sent straight to /dev/null”! :-)
+ 1
Attempted hack? Eh, sorry you have to deal with so much time-wasting nonsense, PZ.
I have always kept my university mail separate from my personal mail, but I whitelisted my university e-mail account years ago. If the incoming message wasn’t from the university domain, or in my personal “university” address book, it got nuked. You have to love filters. But in spite of this, students persisted in sending mail from non-university accounts. I never saw them, and if they came and asked, I reminded them of the protocol I had issues them.
All other aspects of life were handled in other non-work accounts. This is not only good for the purity issue, but it keeps the employer from making accusations that you use a university resource for personal things. I don’t want that opportunity left open either, given the sour relations between admin and the faculty.
@congenital cynic #12:
It should be that your university as an institution has a policy that all official email should be conducted only between university accounts. Of course that policy needs to be communicated effectively to the students, year after year, some of whom, as clever as they undoubtedly are, have a truly magical ability to forget such minor details…
Me, bitter? No. Just occasionally tired of the human element in technological policies.
But can we still get in touch with Ed Brayton by e-mailing [email protected]? Enquiring minds want to know.
(Ed’s mentioned this a couple of times.)
By which — for the sake of clarity — I mean that around 10%* of both staff and students skip, forget or ignore any of the basics which you might do to try to help them. It’s bloody frustrating, when these are the people** we are trying to reach because so many of our processes are ending up as online-only.
* Anecdotal assessment based only upon my experience. And some number-crunching from the logs.
** Counterpoint: A significant number of young people assumed to be ‘digital natives’ can’t tell their arse from their keyboard.
When I was in college ten years ago, I was initially reluctant to use my “proper” academic e-mail account because we were given a clunky, browser-restrictive web interface to access it with. Fortunately the “secret” of the proper POP3 settings leaked out, and I never had to see it again.
Blimey, how times have changed. When I was an undergraduate in the mid 1970s all essays were hand written. Once I’d finished a piece work at two o’clock in the morning that was due in by 9.00am I’d have to walk across campus and slide it under the tutor’s office door. Email? Luxury! Tell that to the kids today and that won’t believe you…
Our campus has outsourced all of our email to M$FT. It’s gone downhill from there. The one good thing is that for a while M$FT servers were filtering all of our university listserv emails to the junk mail folder.
Always wear protective gloves when feeding mail into a nuclear furnace.
@Jonathan #17:
And you managed all that with a hangover, whether you wanted it or not!
Ee, Ah remember when Ah had to deliver mah final year project on deadline. T’buses wern’t runnin’ (we had reet proper strikes in them days) and Ah had to tek the paper round to mah supervisor’s hus bah foot. Barely got there before t’pubs opened…
True story.
The NSA reads your spam, so you don’t have to!
Gee I can’t help but be curious if it’s a coincidence that this comes just after the Hovind post?….
Rich Woods #15:
I knew I wasn’t alone! Thank you!
I sometimes teach computer courses and am contantly surprised by how little many of those “digital natives” actually understand of what they are working with. Not the faintest clue beyond “when I click here, X usually happens”. They grow up as consumers of technology, but to them it might as well be magic.
Me 23:
Meant to add: and then their parent and grandparents tell them they are so good with “technology”. And they start believing themselves to be experts. And then they arrive in my classes…
It’s heartening that “kids today” are getting more savvy about their own privacy, at least, than the ones who came through college a few years ago were. I rarely even have to remind my students these days to use only their university-provided email address when writing to me; years ago I suffered through getting emails from students who had addresses that were… not at all appropriate for a teacher-student relationship. No, I am not going to send an email to “hotdude69er”, nor will I probably read anything that student sends me. They’ve at least learned more about separating their personal and professional online lives.
Marcus Ranum
Actually, that could work out nicely. They get to read your email, and in return, they junk your spam.