The end of an era

I received this email this morning:

Your account mdclemen on the following host(s) will expire on 07-25-2004:

engmail www.eng engage If you will require use of these computer accounts(s) beyond 07-25-2004 in accordance with http://www.adm.uwaterloo.ca/infocist/use98.htm please contact the computer consulting office in your faculty or department. This is an automated message – Please do not respond

My university email address has given me a lot over the years – a way to keep in touch with others, a non-web-based email address that I could safely give out, an air of legitimacy to my online persona with email coming from a university (if they only knew), a place to subscribe to mailing lists and last summer a source of a lot of pain (from one email address). Lots of emails were sent to and from this address over the 6 years that I’ve had it. I lost most of the emails in several hard drive crashes but the shared experiences are still there.

As varied as the experiences has been the software used. From Pine to Outlook to KMail to Horde to Thunderbird, I’ve used a lot of mail applications. Thunderbird is my current favourite (as I’ve mentioned before) but each of the above applications has its own benefits.

I’ll miss my old email address but it wasn’t something that I could hold onto forever. I have my alumni email address from the university and that can forward to any email address I’ll ever have.

Yet another item in the “you’re really done university” checklist can be crossed off.

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