SFU alumni lies (new contact info)
When I graduated from SFU in 2003, the alumni associated offered students a "lifelong" email account. Guess what? Apparently life ends at 30! It's being replaced with an email forwarding service.
I can't say that I'm surprised that they reneged on their promise -- I'm sure that they never actually thought through the logistics of giving a lifelong email account to all alumni. That adds up to many thousands of accounts.
On the other hand, they don't / didn't need to give people a lot of space. I mean, 5 megs should be plenty for email. If somebody wanted to send photos or large documents or whatever other silly things that aren't appropriate for emails, they could go elsewhere.
Other than the backpedaling, I guess it's not too much of a loss. I mean, they didn't offer smtp service, so I had to keep on switching my smtp server based on where I was. In the end I started sending everything through the gmail smtp server, which resulted in some people seeing my gmail accounts as my email address, instead of my actual "lifelong" address.
So I took the plunge and started paying $5/year for a fastmail.fm account. They seem like a good company; they have many connectivity options (including proxies and tunneling stuff, in case the normal ports are blocked), and they seem to have a good reputation amongst geeks.
I'm now using my uvic alumni email forwarding for my email address. Sure, it's exactly the same as the new SFU service... but they never promised anything more. Besides, I spent way more time talking about UVic than SFU these days. I'll keep the SFU email (as a forwarding thing) for the forseeable future so people's emails don't get lost.
graham@percival-music.ca
That's not a change, but over the years, various other addresses have cropped up due to various misconfigurations on my part.
This public address is still going through gmail, but via the "google apps for domains" thing. As mentioned on my contact page, if you want to send anything private, either use encryption or ask me for my other email address. Or just trust that google will Do No Evil (tm). :)