<p>Hey do any of you know if you can set up your Columbia email account yet?</p>
<p>i think that we get our email addresses along with our housing crap in June</p>
<p>last year most people were able to set up their email addresses in late may</p>
<p>Does anybody know why the e-mail addresses are so funky? I thought most colleges had a <a href="mailto:first.lastname@college.edu">first.lastname@college.edu</a> kind of address, but Columbia's seem to mix in initials and numbers.</p>
<p>well, yeah, at Columbia if you send an email to <a href="mailto:first.last@school.edu">first.last@school.edu</a> it gets forwarded to the real address as long as you're the only one with that name.</p>
<p>so i could possibly have my own email right now?</p>
<p>no, because where would it get forwarded. . . to?</p>
<p>no, you need to activate your UNI first, and I'm not sure whether they have assigned incoming students UNIs yet.</p>
<p>does it have to be "first.lastname?" if you are known by an unofficial "american" name rather than your legal one?</p>
<p>How do we ensure that we are the only one with the e-mail <a href="mailto:first.lastname@columbia.edu">first.lastname@columbia.edu</a>?</p>
<p>if you are not the only one, then it simply won't work when you try to send an email to it</p>
<p>"last year most people were able to set up their email addresses in late may"</p>
<p>It's late may now. I really want my email. Has any one gotten theirs yet?</p>
<p>(3 years and questions. Wow.)</p>
<p>Does anyone know if the numbers mean anything?</p>
<p>they do not though professors and staff tend to have 1 or 2 numbers and students tend to have 4.</p>
<p>way to resurrect an ancient thread</p>
<p>before 2002, people who were at the university had their initials, followed by a number that indicated what order the people with those initials joined the university. The first mss would be mss1, then mss2, and so on. This is why Kenneth Jackson is ktj1, because he's been around since before computers existed. </p>
<p>Starting in 2002, AcIS (now CUIT) changed the system so that new UNIs would be harder for computerized spam robots to "guess". Previously issued ones were easy for computers to just generate and then spam. So they started with appending 2001 instead of 1. For example, I was ___2007. I don't think it correlates distinctly with order of admission or anything anymore, I think they've incremented the numbers a few times since then, but that's what it's based on - a desire to avoid you getting spammed.</p>
<p>All you WikiCU folks can quote me on this.</p>
<p>wow interesting....didn't know that...i guess it makes sense though</p>
<p>That sounds an awful lot like security by obscurity. How unfortunate.</p>
<p>We can always give acquaintances our <a href="mailto:first.last@columbia.edu">first.last@columbia.edu</a> address, right? And will engineers be forced to use @seas.columbia.edu?</p>
<p>I've heard that the firstname.lastname forwwardin stopped working. I could be wrong.</p>
<p>Also, I don't think you get school domain name addresses. Everyone gets @columbia.edu.</p>
<p>the CompSci department is on its own network, email server, and phone system. The professors and grad students there have @cs.columbia.edu. Others, I think are all @columbia.edu .</p>
<p>
[quote]
Starting in 2002, AcIS (now CUIT) changed the system so that new UNIs would be harder for computerized spam robots to "guess". Previously issued ones were easy for computers to just generate and then spam. So they started with appending 2001 instead of 1.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Are you sure the change was made to avoid spam bots and not for some other reason, and did you hear that from someone in the know? You're exactly right about the change, but what I heard from the AcIS higher-ups was that it was due to some new batch process for creating the UNIs.</p>
<p>
[quote]
before 2002, people who were at the university had their initials, followed by a number that indicated what order the people with those initials joined the university.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Some important people are issued "vanity" email addresses. Like, George Rupp (the old President) was <a href="mailto:rupp@columbia.edu">rupp@columbia.edu</a>. Also, some AcIS employees also get them. I was [my first name]@columbia.edu, but I didn't get to keep it on graduation. But you still have both a abc123 UNI that you use to log onto SSOL.</p>