I’d hoped I wouldn’t have to do this for a long time, but today I’m changing my e-mail address. See, two days ago I opened a message in Hotmail that was addressed both to my Hotmail account and my BYU account. The odd thing was, I never got it in my BYU account. I then tried forwarding it over, but it never arrived. Yesterday I called the IT people and they found that Spamassassin was marking certain messages (those with subject lines in Thai, because they were in a foreign language and it thought they were uppercase — common spam markings) and dropping them. It’s really disturbing to think that I never got a large number of messages sent to me from my Thai friends over these past few months.
The other problem I’ve run into with BYU’s e-mail servers is that on occasion I would receive e-mails with long paragraphs clipped halfway through the paragraph. I ran some tests to see if it was the sender’s end (by sending messages to my Hotmail and Gmail accounts) and they came through fine, so it’s definitely a BYU issue.
So, instead of living with e-mail angst in the future, I’m switching to Gmail. My new address is ben dot crowder at gmail dot com. (I have another Gmail account but the new convention seems to be firstname.lastname@gmail.com, so I may as well go along with it.) Thank heavens for Gmail SMTP — that’s what makes it possible (since I’ll still mainly be using Apple Mail, just through the Gmail servers). And while I’m at it, I’ll switch my MSN account to Gmail too (apparently you can use a Gmail address for MSN Messenger). Then I can finally consolidate down to one e-mail address. :)
Now I just have to tackle the somewhat-dreaded task of notifying everyone of the new address… (Thank heavens BYU at least has e-mail forwarding!)
[tags]e-mail, Gmail[/tags]