Tufts will put the final nails in emerald's coffin next month, when all students begin to receive web-based email accounts on the painfully overdue Coral server. Embarrassingly enough, the University is one of the last in the nation to make the switch from a cumbersome telnet-based system. The upcoming transition should be a priority not further slowed by bureaucratic excuses that often come with such technological revamping.
Professors and freshmen have already received the upgrade, with the sensible
first-name.last-name@tufts.edu email address. But many of those still awaiting the upgrade have stopped using emerald altogether, and only a responsible few have
bothered to forward emerald mail to their better-equipped Yahoo or Hotmail accounts. With the advent of web-based mail, Tufts will finally have a case in strongly encouraging students to abandon their outside providers. Figuring out a friend's email address will become an intuitive process, you won't need to have taken Comp 6 to know how to read an attachment, and the account will be accessible from any computer with an Internet connection. There's no reason students should be harder to reach, whether they're on campus, home for the summer, or in India for their semester abroad.
Few will be mourn the loss of Emerald. Its UNIX interface was daunting for many, the paltry disc quota an embarrassment to Tufts, and the summer switch to
Secure CRT nothing short of a fiasco. But Emerald did have a charm of its own, enabling its dwindling users to feel technologically astute. If you have never created a "plan," "bannered" someone, or "fingered" a fellow Jumbo, your days to experience these outdated technological kicks are waning. Emerald even has chatting capabilities, minus the buddy lists and away messages.
But ending the Emerald era will not be easy. It must be executed with an overwhelming amount of technological support and encouragement, and it must go off without a hitch. Tufts Computing and Communication Services isn't the most popular administrative group on campus at the moment. In October they accidentally sent an e-mail informing the entire student body that their University affiliation was terminated, and over the summer they abruptly switched to Secure CRT without nearly enough notice - many students spent the summer unable to communicate via Tufts e-mail. The transition to web-based mail is a revolutionary change, however, and TCCS cannot afford to botch it.
