JMU Email System Approaching Uselessness
We've known for several months that JMU would be upgrading their mail system over the Memorial Day holiday, and one of the consequences of the switch would be a move from Mulberry as the primary mail client to a Mirapoint web-based client. Mulberry sucks, and has always sucked, but I used MS Outlook to aggregate my JMU mail account with my other mail accounts. Mulberry's suckage wasn't an issue for me, because the system was open via IMAP.
The status of IMAP access has been unknown. I tried to get a straight answer about whether students would still be allowed to access mail via IMAP, but couldn't get one; from what I'd read, though, it looked like it'd still be an (unsupported) option. Now, it looks like it won't be. From an email received this morning:
Students who do not currently have access to departmental mailboxes will NOT be able to use an IMAP client. They must use Webmail.
Looks like I'm out of luck. I liked IMAP because it allowed me to leave the messages I was dealing with on the server, while moving older stuff to my Outlook data file. I could access what I needed anywhere, and still have an archive. Now, with a 10 MB quota (which is, admittedly, bigger and welcome), I can't be certain that I'll have unlimited archival capacity. Being restricted to a web-based mail client gives me no flexibility in keeping messages in perpetuity, and is essentially useless to me.
There's a petition to keep IMAP availabe to students, but with only 9 signatures and a week until the upgrade, it appears to be doomed. I'll be forwarding my JMU address (which is at least doable) to another account, and aggregating it in that account's IMAP store. What a waste.
May 15, 2003 - 02:21 PM