Banazir's Hate of CNS Mail Knows No Limit

[banazir]

A few days ago, I posted a poll about Microsoft Live Mail that revealed that I am still in the thrall of the Evil Empire. taiji_jian replied with mockery and also gave me some good advice about switching fully to GMail; jereeza said she's happy with the mail she's got.

Something I never quite elucidated in the entry, though, is why I hate CNS Mail so much I taint myself with Hotmail/Live Mail:

I'm miserable with the mail I've got (KSU CNS mail): it has a 10 minute latency, it's a bitch to set up with Mozilla Thunderbird.

• Incoming mail is: imap.ksu.edu, port 993 (the default), SSL authentication, no secure connection.
• Outgoing mail is auth.smtp.ksu.edu, port 26 (instead of the default 25), TLS authentication, secure connection.

I swear I've made more than half mistakes among the 28 combinations (at least 32 failing combinations) of the above 4 options for incoming and 4 for outgoing. In fact, I just put "imap/26/SSL/insecure, auth.smtp/993/TLS/secure" (ports exactly swapped, though Thunderbird would have shown me this was wrong because default ports depend on the session protocol).

I've written it down before, even mailed it to myself, but I've lost my records, and they were nowhere to be found online the last time I checked last August.

CNS Mail is unreliable (downtime of about 1 12-hour day per semester), it has spam filtering that is inferior to all but CIS Mail's (although I'm not complaining about this, because I went from an intolerable 90% spam or 1000+ spams per week to an uncomfortable 50% spam or under 600 spams per week).

I freaking hate the guts of the intestinal parasites of the guts of CNS Mail.

However, I refuse to switch to GMail because:

• 1. They are unrecognizable and/or unprofessional. My GMail addresses are for personal mail. I could sacrifice a few of the seven (all but my first and second one) for university business, but rizanab/labingi/galbasi/brandagamba/razanur@gmail.com are not even based on my RL name. Why should I be telling people to please e-mail a login I created for personal entertainment (RPGs) or socialization (blogs), or as a sign-up spam receivership? hsuwh@hotmail.com is at least recognizable.
• 2. They announce my university's IT failures to the world. It's literally saying "please e-mail a third-party address that's not even my name, because our university's IT infrastructure sucks pureed ewoks and we have not even a semblance of a plan for going offsite, so I'm taking it on myself to provide you with one of my personal addresses". (You might well ask whether hsuwh@hotmail.com does this, too. However, I've been using it for four years for both personal and professional business, when I didn't want to go over university networks, and people know this. For example, I used to use Hotmail and GMail for all massforge correspondence.)
• 3. Believe it or not, GMail will fill up. I have emptied out my Hotmail account (only 2Mb at the time) about a dozen times, so my "hsuwh" folder is about 25Mb. Since Hotmail went to 250Mb, I've filled it up once and deleted a lot of the 2-6Mb attachments. I estimate that I've had a total of 300Mb non-spam come through Hotmail, and maybe an equal amount of spam (many more messages, but with no attachments or smaller ones). My primary and secondary GMail addresses are both at 10%. Meanwhile, my KSU CNS mail gets 50Mb every 3-4 weeks, or about 700Mb a year. In less than 2 years, my GMail will be saturated, and I don't want to have to go through the sheer hassle of pulling it all down via POP then. With Live Mail, I have 2Gb of space and HTTP access to my mailbox, and I've personally seen for myself that I can pull messages from HTTP to an IMAP folder (moving them from Hotmail to KSU CNS).

Thus, Live Mail is more convenient for me than telling everyone to mail my personal GMail(s). I just need to find a way to get KSU CNS to back up the huge message floods automatically, or find time to pull down about 48 monthly chunks averaging 20Mb each. (It's more like 50Mb a month now and 10Mb a month 4 years ago.)

--
Banazir