Lamentations of a Luddite

At some point I will have to surrender my university email address.  I hold it now by grace and favor, and someday my sponsor (for whom I do the odd job of research) will retire, and I'll be faced with the unenviable task of informing everyone with whom I correspond that I've moved, and changing all my log-ins and subscriptions.  Oh joy.

However, the university is making its email a nightmare to deal with.  I may have to relinquish it.

About six months ago, they migrated everything to Outlook, a program which I have to use in my geographical research job, and which I cordially loathe.  To begin with, it makes everything written in it look cheap and chirpy, like tweets.  Couldn't I keep Thunderbird as a front? I asked wistfully.  I like Thunderbird:  it's old-fashioned and text-friendly, and it plays well with my old iMac.  Oh no, they said, but we can fix you up with Apple Mail.   Gee thanks.  That doesn't even have a "next message" function, fer chrissake.  And it's incompatible with all my old mail, so I have this unbridgeable gulf in all my conversations.  Meanwhile, behind the interface, Outlook is running things, and it's a bully:  every day it sends me messages saying, We didn't think you should read this, but if you really want to see it, you can click here and we'll eventually forward it to you with our own datestamp.  Do it soon, or we'll kill it.  I find this officiously intrusive.  (One of the reasons the university adopted Outlook, I think, is for the hive-mindedness:  supposedly, it's given everyone a common and synchronic calendar.  I hope they also get a private one, or everyone will be taking each other's cats to soccer practice and their children to the vet.)

As if that weren't enough, any replies I made from my iPhone or iPad stopped turning up as sent mail or in my inbox, so I couldn't see my half of a correspondence, except as quoted.  Eventually, I tracked them all to the ghost town of my old account, which is a cul-de-sac:  it can still receive (though it shouldn't) but not send.  And they abided, thick as leaves in Vallombrosa.  They'd all turned back to Thunderbird.  And because Mail is an entirely different creature, I couldn't even transfer them to a working folder.  Things got—fragmented.

Then a week ago, Mail died.  Just like that.  Every time I opened it, it crashed.  Fortunately, my small devices still sent and received, or I'd run mad.

I had one of those spooky consultations where (from somewhere in the clouds) a ghost tech Ouijas your cursor.  After trying everything he knew or could look up—trash this and trash that—he told me to re-install my operating system.

Oh great.  First I had to clear space on my backup drive (which was silted up); then do the backup:  a lengthy process.  Then I couldn't find my Snow Leopard disc (I told you I was old-fashioned), and decided it would cost less in time and aggravation to replace it.  Then I had to reinstall it.  Then I had to download five updates, and install each one in turn.  Then I opened Mail.

It crashed.

So I got another ghost techie in.  He couldn't revive it; said my OS shouldn't ever have worked at all with Exchange.  Why don't you bring your desktop in, and we'll fix it up so it runs El Capitan?

No thank you, not just now, I said.

So he set up Outlook, and I eyed it loathingly, and asked, So how do I archive my mail?

Archive? he said.  Why?  You've got 50 GB in the Cloud.

Yes, and when I close my account, it all vanishes, as if it never was.

Couldn't I just have Thunderbird? I said wistfully.  And bless his heart, he rigged it up by a back way, quite cleverly.  I spent a joyous few hours reuniting all my conversations sundered in the middle—until I discovered that now my Gmail doesn't know me, and that Outlook has vengefully trashed my work account.

Ah, technology!

Nine