Miscellany on Email

You might have noticed that I added a culturecat.net email address to my sidebar. After much frustration with the University of Minnesota's email client, I have decided to make my hosting company's email program, SquirrelMail, my primary email interface, meaning I arranged for my UMN email to forward there. I was absolutely fed up with the fact that, first off, the UMN Webmail interface has no BCC field, even though if you want to email all your students and they have arranged for total suppression of all their information, FERPA says that you must put the students' email addresses in your BCC field. Well, in order to do that, I have to have a BCC field to put them in, don't I?! Also, it's very annoying that if you put an apostrophe in the subject line of the email, UMN Webmail (don't know about Pine) drops it. Can't becomes cant, don't becomes dont, Clancy's becomes Clancys, etc.

Now I'm overjoyed that I can actually put apostrophes in the subject line and I can BCC people! Woo-hoo! Plus, SquirrelMail allows me to have separate identities, so I can email someone as ratli008 at umn or as clancy at culturecat. Sometimes I feel that I need the credibility that an institutional email address offers, especially if I'm emailing someone I don't know at another university. Funny how that works.

Edited to add: Another reason I love this email client is that they have a lot of different visual display themes, including one called "In the Pink." The name makes me cringe, but I have always wanted to have a pink email interface.