Fun With VAX

Brown called me on the phone yesterday, and we talked briefly about how I still have an RIT account and full user priveleges. A few minutes ago I Telnetted in to rit.edu for kicks. It told me that mail will no longer be emailed to my account because I’m over the storage quota. This happened (at least) once before, and I think the system deleted all my messages. Right now I have over 5,000 messages in my Inbox. I am fairly certain that every single message is spam. It’s not even worth the time to look for messages from real people. I mean, I used to have a story at the really old page about how if anyone were to email me at the old address, I would never respond and that person would think I’m a prick. I posted that story like eighteen months ago. And it’s still an issue.

So anyway, back to today. I was poking around VAX when I found:

Note: “SET FORWARD” at the “EMAIL>” prompt is now obsolete! For mail
preferences changes, including changing your mail forwarding, please
visit:

http://start.rit.edu

Of course, in VAX, the URL wasn’t a link itself, because it’s Telnet, not a web browser. Although you can use LYNX in VAX … hmm … Anyway, I checked it out. It’s really not bad. It’s got a lot of information and services, and it replaces and expands upon the old site (I’ll be damned if I can remember the URL) that you had to type in to register a computer on RIT’s network. It expands upon that site with some account management features. Seeing as how I’ve been stuck in this 23-months-and-counting grace period, and I’ve gotten probably 15,000 spams, I decided to check out the link to manage your mail preferences. It’s a neat page; There’s a box to change your forwarding address, a box to change your personalized address, a place to change your preferences for your listing in the campus directory.

Only problem is, it doesn’t work. I make changes to the fields, hit submit, and get an error message. After closer review I think it’s missing some radio buttons. Oh well. Not like I go there anymore.

Fun With VAX