The LionMail Pride is complete

Many of Columbia’s grad students have now joined the undergrads on LionMail. As of about two weeks ago, we’re all one big, happy LionMail family. Here is the press release from CUIT:

CUIT is pleased to announce that many graduate schools are now using LionMail, Columbia’s Google-powered email and calendar solution.

On January 15, over 12,000 members of the Columbia community began using LionMail. This included graduate students from Continuing Education, the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences and the School of Journalism, along with adjunct faculty from Continuing Education and staff from the School of the Arts.

“The Journalism School welcomes the opportunity to use LionMail, because the convenience and security it offers will enhance the user experience. There has been great anticipation for the implementation of this system,” said Nicholas Lemann, Dean, and Henry R. Luce Professor of Journalism. The first phase of the transition includes students, while faculty and staff will be added at a later date.

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The froshpeople seem to have gotten the hang of things already, but you old fogies who still use CubMail directly are in for a rude awakening. Over the last few weeks, CUIT has been shuffling your shit in preparation for the move to Columbia’s new Google-powered platform, LionMail, on July 31st. That’s tomorrow. To avoid adding one more headache to your weekday hangover, here’s what you need to know come morning:

• As many of you who have already evolved beyond the troglodytic CubMail likely already noticed, Gmail users can no longer use their UNI as an alternate e-mail address.
• In a similar vein, those of you sneaky enough to have created a UNI@columbia.edu personal Google account will have encountered the conflicting account alert some time in the last few weeks.
• Any e-mails larger than 25MB were not transferred to LionMail. To move any such monolithic messages to LionMail, sort your CubMail inbox by message size and forward them to yourself tomorrow!
• If you want to set up LionMail access on your mobile device or an external client, you’ll need a special device password (distinct from your UNI password). CUIT has prepared step-by-step instructions for configuring most popular mobile and e-mail client platforms.
• Though LionMail will give you access to a university wide directory of UNIs, CubMail address book entries with multiple contacts will not be copied to your LionMail address book. To re-create them, copy the e-mail addresses into a text file and then paste them into a new contact group in LionMail.
• LionMail comes with the incredibly powerful Google Calendar; check out CUIT’s introduction to the system, including how to import your New CourseWorks schedule (!!!)
• Obviously undergraduates without prior access won’t be able to log-in until tomorrow, but the link for your bookmarks is the ever-straightforward lionmail.columbia.edu and sign-in is with your UNI and UNI password. If you really want the user manual for first-time login, check out CUIT’s guide.

The effect this will have on your life if you already use forwarding

In an e-mail sent out earlier this afternoon, CUIT’s LionMail team informs you that they have their grubby hands on your data and they’re doing some fancy new-fangled shuffling—but don’t worry, they’ll be gentle:

Dear Undergraduate Student,

We hope you are excited about your upcoming move to LionMail @ Columbia.

On July 31 you will be start to use [sic] your new LionMail account. Beginning July 13 your existing CubMail messages and folders will be migrated to LionMail. This process will be transparent and will not affect your use of CubMail or any other email clients.

Before the process of moving your data begins, please review some brief information: <http://cuit.columbia.edu/lionmail-pre-transition-steps>

If you have any questions or concerns about the transition, or any other information, please contact the LionMail help team at askcuit@columbia.edu.

Sincerely,

The LionMail team

Semi-Transparent Square via Wikimedia Commons

Now that you’re all entered in the lottery in an attempt to snag one of the first thousand accounts of LionMail, take a look at these super secret screenshots of what it’ll look like….which is essentially the Gmail interface with the perk of a preloaded Columbia directory. It’ll make e-mailing faculty easier, but just make sure you’re not on your LionMail account late Saturday night.

As we heard in January, Google Apps (“Lionmail”) are slated to replace Cubmail. It’ll be called Lionmail, which is like cubs, but grown up. Everyone will get Lionmail by 2012, but 1000 lucky students will score it in mid-April, as part of the trial “Phase One.” If that interests you, sign up for the lottery that they emailed us about.

And if you want a sneak peak of the future holds, a tipster sent in what may well be the login page. As of now, UNI login does not work.

The future of eight years ago is the end of this year.

Of course, Barnard already has gBear, which means fun shit gets to happen over there. Let’s pray PrezBo ends up replying to a school-wide listserv disaster; it would be nice to hear from him.

Full email after the jump