For Your Information


My personal tips, tricks, and recommendations.

University-assigned email + Gmail = Professionalism
Over the years, I've had email accounts with a number of providers including Yahoo.com (6 accounts), GoBot.com (6), HotMail.com (2), Mail.com (2), Netscape.com (1), and others that I can't remember. I guess I was searching for the 'perfect' email provider. Around the beginning of 2005, I was invited to open a Gmail account. By the end of the year, I had officially closed all my other email accounts and I'm now down to five Gmail accounts (one for family/friends, one for social networking, one for business, one for online activity and one for academic purposes). I have found that Gmail synergizes well with my university email.

When you were first enrolled as a student at Rowan, you were assigned a Email ID (ex: lamy) which forms part of your Rowan email address. Many of the university's departments send correspondence to this address. The university allows you two options in accessing your emails:
  1. Log into NetMail on the Campus Portal Page.
  2. Forward your emailID@rowan.edu emails to an email address of your choice.

Initially, I used the web access link to access my @rowan.edu emails, but I quickly found that it lacked many of the functionalities that I had grown to expect of an email account. So I decided to have my emails forwarded to my Gmail account (the one for academic purposes), and have been absolutely pleased with the results. One of the features I especially liked is the "Custom 'From' Address" It allows you to set other email addresses in your Gmail account so that when you send an email the recipient will see the 'from' address of your choosing. As a result of this feature, the students in my discussion sessions would see my email as coming from my Rowan email address and would reply to it and I would receive it in my Gmail account. This gave a definite air of professionalism. You can find out more about this feature at Custom 'From' Addresses.

Another feature that is very useful to me as a porfessor is the ability to create a "Contact Group". With this I go directly to 'compose mail' and just start typing the name of the 'contact group' in the 'to:' section and the auto-complete feature gives suggestions and I choose the one I want.

There are many other features in Gmail that work to establish the image of professionalism expected of university personnel without the loss of functionality.
To find out more about Gmail and to obtain an account (if desired), visit Gmail.com.
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Tabbed Browsing and the Customizable FireFox Browser
coming later...whenever I get around to it.
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Creating and Securing PDFs
coming later...whenever I get around to it.
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