Technology Review: "Cmail"

Way back when--say, last week--Chicago students checked email using something called "Webmail." It was purple/blue and looked a whole lot like Andrew Sullivan's blog. Well, they shut down the entire University's email for much of the weekend, and we now have Cmail. While I usually check email using pine, I've decided to give this Cmail a try, since it is, as promised, much quicker to use than Webmail.

The good things about Cmail:

• It actually opens mail soon after you click on it.
• It doesn't look quite so much like andrewsullivan.com.
• It doesn't accuse you of trying to break into your own account every time you attempt to log in.
• If you mess around with the settings, you can get deleted messages to go right to the trash.

The not-so-good things about Cmail:

• The page is almost entirely white, with no box delineating where email ends and generic screen-space begins. In other words, it looks unfinished, but that's apparently how it's supposed to look.
• As my cubicle-mate pointed out, it's very difficult to tell the two beige envelope icons, one meaning "read" and one meaning "unread", apart.
• It has yet to deliver any messages from male cast members of "Yossi and Jagger." A glitch in the system, no doubt...