Tue 22 Sep 2009
Webmail at Williams
Posted by wslack under Williams Website at 10:08 pm
Alums and other Ephblog readers: this one will probably be Greek to you. Sorry.
Here are a few tips for using the Williams webmail system:
- Expand beyond your inbox. You can add additional folders beyond the Inbox, Drafts, Sent, and Trash folders. My additional folders include one for the Daily Messages, one for Ephblog comment notifications, one for Outling Club messages, and more for other groups. You can put messages into these folders using…
- Message Filters. For example, I have my filters set to send anything with “Daily Messages” in the title to the folder I made for them. You can also automatically forward messages from certain people to another e-mail address as well. You do this by….
- Changing your options. Options are found on the top right of webmail, next to “Help” and “Sign Out.” Under “personal,” you can change the name that appears in the “From” field, so that I know that Meredith Kineid is sending me an e-mail, and not mok3@williams.edu. Message filters are under mail. Some other options to change:
- More messages per page. Under Settings > Display; mine is set for 50. You also want to enable the message pane but disable HTML.
- Save original messages under your reply. Otherwise, I’m not sure what question of mine you’re responding to, especially if its been a few days. Under Composing > Format > Reply.
- If you want, forward all messages to another account. Under forwarding. I prefer not to, but plenty of friends put everything on Gmail.
- Use the search. Webmail search is fast and easy to use – it’s my quickest way of finding old messages. (I save everything, so I need search to look through all 7999 messages in my inbox or >2000 messages in the folders.)
And lastly, if you don’t have time to reply to e-mails, don’t open them. Otherwise, you forget to reply because of the volume of messages you get, and whoever sent you the message is left in the dark. I can’t count how many times I’ve gotten an e-mail reply only when I randomly bump into someone. The counterpoint of this is that if no one replies to your e-mail, don’t be surprised.
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34 Responses to “Webmail at Williams”
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wslack says:
8000 messages in the inbox, 2 minutes after posting this. They come fast and often.
September 22nd, 2009 at 10:15 pmRonit says:
Yup. Putting everything in Gmail is what I’d recommend. Gmail search features and loading speeds are the best. And outgoing mail you send from the Gmail interface can now use the proper SMTP servers so it looks like it’s coming from williams.edu
September 22nd, 2009 at 10:23 pmfrank uible says:
It is Greek to me. I’m still learning to master my crystal set.
September 22nd, 2009 at 11:04 pmParent '12 says:
I hesitate to comment after your getting 8000 email messages so quickly.
But, Will, did you post on EB because there are really enough students who read this who would benefit from your pointers?
And, I know my son forwards to what I would call a central email address. I believe to streamline.
September 22nd, 2009 at 11:40 pmwslack says:
@Parent ’12: Yes; students here actually read Ephblog (though most are discouraged from posting by other authors), and I actually think it will be of use to them. It’s also a little self-serving; I can send people the link to this post if they ever have questions about webmail, which has happened twice in the past two weeks.
September 23rd, 2009 at 1:35 am'10 says:
Willipedia works for this too, and it might reach a larger student audience.
September 23rd, 2009 at 2:01 amwslack says:
@’10: Done, thanks ’10.
September 23rd, 2009 at 2:10 amDavid says:
Parent ’12: Our best estimate is that hundreds of students read EpgBlog. Needless to say, this ranges from people who look at EphBlog everyday to those who only stop by occasionally. I have met many students who have never heard of EphBlog. At the same time, my sense is that most of the students with any significant interest in how Williams works as an institution — the sorts of students who write for the Record, run fro College Council or end up in Gargoyle — are readers.
Will: Could you explain what you mean by writing “most are discouraged from posting by other authors?”
1) Does this mean that students are discouraged both from posting comments and from joining us as authors as you have done? I could imagine someone, in good faith, discouraging student X from joining us as an author but would find it surprising if someone were discouraging students from commenting, especially anonymously.
2) Who is doing the discouraging? I hope that none of our current authors are! Or do you mean that some students look at the posts written by our current authors and, because of those posts and not something an author has actually said to them, are discouraged from writing at EphBlog?
September 23rd, 2009 at 8:49 amWill Slack '11 says:
@David: Meta discussion!
This is STRONGLY not my sense whatsoever. I also doubt that hundreds of students are regular readers. What will happen, on occasion, is that a specific post gets forwarded to an e-mail list.
You. You are not literally telling students not to, but my your posts and comments, you discourage others from affiliating themselves, especially by name. That is exactly what I meant with my first words, though they were intentinally ambiguous.
September 23rd, 2009 at 1:08 pmDavid says:
1) I have been told in past years that Record reporters were regular readers. But that could have been wrong then or might be wrong now. I have talked, in the past, to Gargoyle and College Council readers, but never asked how widespread readership is in those groups, then or now.
I think that, on a typical day, at least one hundreds students click on EphBlog. Given that we have hundreds of readers in Williamstown (if you believe Google Analytics) then this almost has to be the case. Note that readership from Williamstown drops dramatically just when students readers go away, like during Spring Break.
How many of this hundred read everyday is a much harder question. It could be that the same 100 students read EphBlog everyday and the other 1900 have never heard of it. More likely, however, is that some check a few times a week or month (or when an entry is brought to their attention). I would define a “regular reader” as someone who stops by at least 7 days per month. How many regular readers do we have in total? How many of these are students? Tough to say. (Any Google Analytics experts willing to help us answer this?)
2) You really think that there are a large number of students who would be willing to become authors at EphBlog but who don’t do so because of me? I will take the other side of that. So, let’s have an experiment!
I would be eager to take a year long break from EphBlog, to not write another post until the summer. But, I won’t to ensure that EphBlog continues to be a happy, busy place in my absence. So, if you know some (at least 5?) students who would participate were it not for me, invite them to join. If they/you promise to have a new post up most days (with 7 students, that would be just one post per person per week), I would be happy to take a vacation until June.
My prediction, however, is that, while there are a lot of students with very strong objections to my politics and rhetoric (and with no great love for uncomfortable learning), none of them would be willing to become regular authors at EphBlog even if I were not here.
It is an empirical question!
3) Although I appreciate the attempt to spare my feelings, there is no need for ambiguity in this context. If thing X is preventing more students from becoming authors on EphBlog, then we want to know.
September 23rd, 2009 at 1:25 pmSam says:
It’s an empirical question, and we have an empirical answer:
September 23rd, 2009 at 1:38 pm-97 and counting….
Ronit says:
@Will Slack ’11:
Looking at the Google Analytics data, and especially the spike in on campus readership after the end of summer break, I would guess that we have probably 150 or so regular student readers who visit daily – the majority of our on-campus readers are repeat readers (only 11% of the Williams visitors in the last month are new visitors). There is no good way to confirm this precisely. But I am certain that EphBlog does get read regularly by a significant minority of people on campus.
September 23rd, 2009 at 2:20 pmWill Slack '11 says:
@Ronit: Hmmm… Interesting.
@David: I don’t have the time to be a managing editor-equivalent. I promise that there are students (more than the significant number I’ve talked to) who would occasionally contribute, but don’t because of Ephblog’s reputation.
That said, I still post here because there are compelling reasons to do that as well.
September 23rd, 2009 at 2:29 pmRonit says:
@Will Slack ’11: By the way, I really appreciate your posts and hope you’ll stick around. You don’t need to be managing editor, but posts and comments from you (and a few other current students who have joined us recently as contributors) make this a far more worthwhile publication to read.
September 23rd, 2009 at 2:35 pmJeffZ says:
Amen to that, Ronit. And David, now that we have a ratings system, even if it wasn’t obvious before, now you have (in combination with commetns) pretty compelling feedback on the types of posts that annoy a substantial number of people (and if internet explorer users could vote, the tallies would likely be far higher). Now, you may think it is worth it to annoy people and that is a valuable thing to do, uncomfortable learning as you like to put it (others might characterize it differently). But if you genuinely do want to change Ephblog’s reputation on campus (and granted, there would be a lag time, so it might take a full academic year), you could probably cut only ten to twenty percent of what you post, at most twenty, and very few people would find much objectionable in the reaminder. Again, you started this blog and you can post whatever you want, I’m just saying, there is a middle ground between cutting off all posts, on the one hand, and continuing to regularly anger a lot of campus readers to the detriment of Ephblog’s reputation among students and faculty, on the other. It’s your call …
September 23rd, 2009 at 2:47 pmRonit says:
@David: You’re free to take a vacation any time you like. We don’t need to ensure post commitments beforehand. There is no shortage of spontaneous topics for other authors to post about when they see fit.
September 23rd, 2009 at 2:59 pmDavid says:
That depends on your point of view. There will be new material on EphBlog virtually everyday. That is a committment that I have made to our readers and a committment that I will keep, at least for the next few years. You (and some/many/most others) may not care about that committment, and that’s fine. But that is the condition under which I take vacations.
Indeed! And big props to Ronit for setting up the system. There seems little doubt that I am responsible for 95% (or more) of all negative votes. Uncomfortable learning rocks! I walk (however imperfectly) in the shadow of Bob Gaudino.
Not sure I want to. Guess it depends on what aspect of the reputation you have in mind. I want EphBlog to have a reputation as more than just KaneBlog. Huge progress has been made on that score in the last two years. I would like EphBlog to have more posts, by more authors, on more topics from more points of view. Great success on that score too!
Sometimes, people use “Ephblog’s reputation” to mean “that place where some crazy right wing alum writes very un-PC rants.” Guilty as charged! If you want the inside scoop on how, for example, Williams practices affirmative action, EphBlog is the only game in town. Some people hate us/me for it. Too bad.
True. But since some of that material involves precisely the viewpoints that a Williams student will (almost) never hear from a Williams professor, it is some of the most important educational posts that we provide. So provide it I will.
[I agree that I could modify my style quite a bit and accomplish more. Special thanks to Whitney, LG, Jeff, JG and others for various suggestions over the years. I like to think that I am better at this than I was before.
But even if I were perfect in my non-inflamatory even-handededness, my posts (and EphBlog) would have the same reputation because 95% of the problem is the viewpoint I express. Only 5% is my style.]
Is there really? Not without an unacceptable cost in intellectual honesty.
Let’s be specific. I am working on a new post about athletic admissions that will provide lots of new and never-published details about, for example, how tips are allocated. I have no doubt that this post will get many, many negative votes. Do you really think that I should not publish it?
September 23rd, 2009 at 3:16 pmRonit says:
@David:
Don’t worry about it. I agree that having new material on a regular basis is important, but I have full confidence that we’ll get that regardless of pre-existing commitments made by other authors.
September 23rd, 2009 at 3:22 pmPTC says:
I think David is the cornerstone of this place, and the reason that we have so many daily student readers. Ephblog is like a train wreck because Dave puts out uncomfortable opinions and views. He also has allowed other more annoying personas (like me, the anonymous angry townie) to continue to post on the blog.
There is not a doubt in my mind that Kane is responsible for this huge (150) daily student reader population. Think about it, 5% of the school reads Ephblog everyday. That means most classes have an Ephblog reader in them.
Look at the group Dave has put together here as contributors. The vast range of groups represented by authors. Look at how great this site is technically. This is an amazing blog. The best blog on the internet. The opinions posted here span the entire political spectrum and field of interests.
Kudos to you dave. You kick ass. As far as I am concerned, 100 negative votes is just as good, if not perhaps better, than 100 positive votes. If people want to read self fulfilling commentary they can head on over to Daily Kos or Red State. Here at Ephblog, there is something to make everyone feel uncomfortable. That is what makes this site outstanding.
September 23rd, 2009 at 6:16 pmDavid says:
PTC: Thanks for the kind words. Some clarifications:
1) The technical wonder of EphBlog was due to Eric Smith’s hard work over several years but is now handled beautifully by Ronit, with growing help from Ken. They deserve the credit, not me.
2) The big credit for group dynamics (recruiting, retaining, providing useful rules) goes to the Board, now led by Dick Swart.
3) It is not that people want me to go away. Almost all readers love (or don’t mind) 80% of my posts. There were, I suspect, few complaints about my efforts to collect and post the last 10 years of Reports From Williams this morning.
Reasonable members of the community just think that EphBlog would be better if I stopped posting the 20% of posts that generate the most negative votes (or that I modify those posts to make them less offensive). And maybe they are right! It is a hard question with no easy answer. I certainly know enough about our readers to be fairly good at guessing which posts will generate lots of negative votes.
I agree that some of the best and most important of my posts generate some of the most negative votes. But I also recognize that there are reasonable Ephs who think that such posts do more harm than good.
September 23rd, 2009 at 7:18 pmrory says:
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA at this: “If you want the inside scoop on how, for example, Williams practices affirmative action, EphBlog is the only game in town”
September 23rd, 2009 at 7:45 pmDavid says:
Rory: Here are several thousand words about affirmative action with references to a wide range of Williams-specific discussions, including quotes from Williams Admissions, Williams professors, Williams students and so on. Got a better source for affirmative action at Williams, representative of the wide range of viewpoints held by members of the Williams community? Of course you don’t.
At best, you might provide links to a handful of academics and, while I appreciate those links, they are problematic because:
1) Much of that work is unavailable unless you have access to a university library. Our discussion is just a click away.
2) None of that work is Williams-specific.
3) All of that work, every single word of anything that you might link to, is published by professors who think that today’s affirmative action regime is a good idea. They may be right, but they hardly represent a broad spectrum of opinion.
September 23rd, 2009 at 8:12 pmJeffZ says:
Yeah, PTC voices some true sentiments. I really do appreciate the (all-too-rare) diversity of viewpoints and perspectives on this blog, even if some of those views at times infuriate me. I also think that the blog does a nice job of weeding out the truly vile (banning one particularly problematic poster about a year ago) contamination that makes so much of the internet virtually unreadable. Even though I sometimes am critical of certain posts or comments, the vast majority of blogs are not nearly so civil, nor feature discourse as productive, as this one; while we may sometimes shout at or over each other virtually, that seems to be the default setting at most of the blogosphere. Either that, or it is just a bunch of like-minded people patting each other on the backs. Also, I’ve certainly seen no college blog (and without a doubt no peer college blog) that remotely approaches the participation volume / diversity of participants that Ephblog seems to have.
Speaking of which, might be cool to place a link somewhere on the site to the other NESCAC alumni/student blogs (I know Amherst, Wesleyan, Midd all have them …. maybe others as well).
September 23rd, 2009 at 8:30 pmPTC says:
David- All fine and dandy, but you created and managed this animal to what it is today. Of course, no one person makes the blog what it is… but you essentially are the face on this thing that got all these contributors and techies to go along for the ride.
People would not read this if it were boring. I mean really, who wants to sit down and read the endless droning of elitist Profs comparisons of Afghanistan to Vietnam while liberals clap for hours? Here you get arguments. Here you get people who debate things that most students are scared to debate in class for fear of retribution. Here you can speak out, without being labeled or restricted by who you are, what you do, who you know etc. This place allows for the free flow of ideas.
September 23rd, 2009 at 8:36 pmPTC says:
By the way… no offense to any elitist liberal prof who may be reading the above.
Regards- The angry townie!
September 23rd, 2009 at 8:37 pmPTC says:
Oh sorry… the angry stupid townie…. i meant to say.
September 23rd, 2009 at 8:39 pmrory says:
BWAHAHAHAHAHA x2….so now being the biggest and most opinionated bloviator = knowing and giving the inside scoop?
deeper into the rabbit hole we go…when david will stop, nobody knows (but many of us are anxiously awaiting that moment!).
(btw, yet another goalpost move! you went from inside scoop on how it’s done to “a broad spectrum”. Are you an objective reporter? no. so the idea that professors are somehow less reliable/more subjective than you is, quite frankly, an embarrassing farce, yet more proof of your disdain for the academy, and your inability to reflect on how you present yourself).
(jeff–i think i just took the bait i avoided earlier today!)
as much as ephblog’s many regulars may make nice about the “diversity of viewpoints”, I’m frankly exhausted by this blog’s (read: david’s) often-condescending tone towards the academy, minorities @ williams (how often have you heard about something good about a black or hispanic faculty member or student or alum other than Clarence Otis? Now, compare that to the negative comments about affirmative action and those members of the community. not exactly close to equal). I don’t find this blog friendly to all of the williams community. Not at all. I’ve received emails proving that point in the past. Let’s not get too lovey-dovey about ourselves…especially in another post in which david makes egregious claims about himself.
i hate metadiscussion and my role in perpetuating it, but i’m not going to be silent. maybe now i will.
September 23rd, 2009 at 9:13 pmDavid says:
My positive comments about minority faculty member have vastly exceeded my negative comments about them. The fact that you don’t see this is indicative of your inability to consider opposing viewpoints seriously. (I believe the same is true of students and alumni, but it is sometimes harder to judge minority status in those cases.)
September 23rd, 2009 at 9:19 pmrory says:
what an amazingly convenient reading of my post david.
and no links (not that i want them)…hmm…
September 23rd, 2009 at 10:20 pmJr. Mom says:
Rory, I am SO appreciative that you speak your mind. Please, please, please, don’t stop.
There has been a lot of talk about who has done what to make EB better, and the board has been mentioned and appreciated, and authors thanked, and even other bloggers acknowledged for all of their good advice and input, which is all well and good, but I have said it before, waaaaaay back when (before I had the added pleasure of having met you), that this site would be a sorry place without your voice, and I appreciate that you speak up when you do. And I would bet big bucks, that there are legions of silent readers who count on you to represent their voices as well.
FWIW…
September 24th, 2009 at 2:05 amDavid says:
Rory writes:
This is the typical attitude that I have been dealing with for decades. If I say Bad Thing X about a minority faculty member, then I must be a bad person, I must be someone who is racist or, at best, deaf to the need for affirmative action bromides. It is not enough for Rory to note that he and I disagree about affirmative action at Williams. It must be the case that I say more bad things (and fewer good things) about minority faculty than I do about non-minority faculty.
Fortunately, this is an empirical question. For every link that Rory provides of me saying something bad (whether reasonable or not) about a minority faculty, I will provide three links in which I say something good. (Rory is likely to refuse to play this game, because that is the sort of guy he is.)
I will even go first!
September 24th, 2009 at 12:47 pmJG says:
If you mean the sort of guy who actually has a life outside of EphBlog that is more worth his time, he is guilty as charged.
September 24th, 2009 at 12:59 pmDavid says:
If he is too busy to back up his slurs, then he should refrain from making them. Is he willing to take back this insult or not?
September 24th, 2009 at 1:02 pmrory says:
LMAO. that’s a slur? if that’s a slur, it’d be waaaaaaaaay too easy to win your stupid little game. I asked a rhetorical question, your level of offense here is funny, considering what you’ve claimed about me in your posts.
also funny: another goalpost move! I said “black and hispanic” and david comes back with an asian and a black example! d’oh! lol.
oh, and JG’s right…i need to get back to my dissertation proposal. sorry, no game playing for me. you can keep tilting at me as your proverbial windmill if you so choose.
“the sort of guy he is”. lol. that’s gonna keep me laughing for a while.
September 24th, 2009 at 1:26 pm