My New Email

My school recently issued new email addresses and user ID's to everyone. I was pretty excited, because like everything else I use on the net, our new emails were to be powered by Google [insert cheer here]. But, like most things created by people I have no influence over, it turned out to be quite a disappointment.

You would think that, given the fact that it is a school ID and most likely to be used for the next four years for everything from casual emails to job interviews, they would customize it to your name. That's what they did with our former "lonestar" accounts. Mine was jmitchen@lonestar.utsa.edu. Makes sense, right? "jmitchen" is clearly the first letter of my first name, and then the next seven letters of my last name. I would prefer "mitchener", but perhaps they had an 8 letter limit. I settled.

My new UTSA ID is "zai618". Must I comment on how stupid this is?

Then I thought: "Well hey, maybe the tag sucks, but it's a Google account, right? I can at least tie all my Google stuff to my new UTSA email, even stick a Gmail shortcut on my Google Homepage. Wrong. Apparantly, even though this new email is a UTSA account, Gmail is something different. My account is simply "powered by Google." So though it looks like a Gmail account, operates as a Gmail account, and even has all the same features as a Gmail account, it's not quite Gmail.

I really don't like stupid people, and clearly, they were the only ones in charge of setting up this system of UTSA email.