New e-mail address directive at Oslo University College fails in life.
Saturday, 3. October 2009, 17:47:43
Someone at the Oslo University College, OUC by short, have now come up with the idea that the e-mail addresses should be more unified and anonymous. Here's a snippet from their Wiki page:
The previous format was: firstname.lastname@stud.department.hio.no, which should seldom crash. Why can't they just learn from their “big brother” the University of Oslo? The University of Oslo has the e-mail address as with the username in the format first name + 1 or more letters of the middle and last name. If your name was Johnny Frederick Doe, you'd probably have a username like “johnnyfd”. If then user Johnny Fullhouse Doncaster joined, he'd get something like “johnnyfdon” or “johnnydon”.
But the Oslo University College just disregards this and gives the users an anonymous “s123456” username to log onto their network. It's fine, I guess, but the problem is when you are going to send a mail to your friend or fellow student at the college. If his name was as before Johnny Frederick Doe, you could guess that he would be accessible at johnnyf.doe@stud.department.hio.no, but now you have to find out what student number he has in order to be able to send him an e-mail at all. It's working against the bare concepts of e-mails. E-mails aren't meant to be cryptic and hard-to-use. You should be able to just bring up the client and then dispatch the e-mail at will.
Another thing is what people will say when you are sending an e-mail to someone in the real world. What would the random guy in the random business think when he's getting an e-mail from “John Doe [IU]” with the e-mail address “s123456@stud.hio.no”? I don't really know about him, but I would at least think that it's spam. Who else would have an e-mail address with not one or two but six digits in a row? I'll laugh out loudly when people are complaining in lectures that they aren't receiving any answers to their e-mails.
Following this, I'll dispatch an e-mail to all my lecturers saying that I cannot use the e-mail system at school anymore due to my sincere lack of faith in it. I'll monitor it, but I'll never ever send an e-mail with it again in fear of it being discarded as spam, especially if it's containing something important such as an assignment or a project delivery.
As of October 15th 2009, all students at OUC will receive a new emailaddress. The new address format is:
login@stud.hio.no
For an imaginary student John Doe with student number 123456 at our department EST, the new address will then become:
s123456@stud.hio.no
In our standard applications, like Webmail and Thunderbird, the address will be shown as:
John Doe [EST] - <s123456@stud.hio.no>
The previous format was: firstname.lastname@stud.department.hio.no, which should seldom crash. Why can't they just learn from their “big brother” the University of Oslo? The University of Oslo has the e-mail address as with the username in the format first name + 1 or more letters of the middle and last name. If your name was Johnny Frederick Doe, you'd probably have a username like “johnnyfd”. If then user Johnny Fullhouse Doncaster joined, he'd get something like “johnnyfdon” or “johnnydon”.
But the Oslo University College just disregards this and gives the users an anonymous “s123456” username to log onto their network. It's fine, I guess, but the problem is when you are going to send a mail to your friend or fellow student at the college. If his name was as before Johnny Frederick Doe, you could guess that he would be accessible at johnnyf.doe@stud.department.hio.no, but now you have to find out what student number he has in order to be able to send him an e-mail at all. It's working against the bare concepts of e-mails. E-mails aren't meant to be cryptic and hard-to-use. You should be able to just bring up the client and then dispatch the e-mail at will.
Another thing is what people will say when you are sending an e-mail to someone in the real world. What would the random guy in the random business think when he's getting an e-mail from “John Doe [IU]” with the e-mail address “s123456@stud.hio.no”? I don't really know about him, but I would at least think that it's spam. Who else would have an e-mail address with not one or two but six digits in a row? I'll laugh out loudly when people are complaining in lectures that they aren't receiving any answers to their e-mails.
Following this, I'll dispatch an e-mail to all my lecturers saying that I cannot use the e-mail system at school anymore due to my sincere lack of faith in it. I'll monitor it, but I'll never ever send an e-mail with it again in fear of it being discarded as spam, especially if it's containing something important such as an assignment or a project delivery.
), I have to complete this by the end of Friday. My plan is to get this done tomorrow so that I can enjoy the Friday with 
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