DERY | What Email Culture Reveals About America

One would expect email — like landlines or flip phones — to have become outdated with time, ultimately giving way to modern forms of communication like social media or texting. Yet, email has sneakily blended in amongst modern social media, even though its core principle remains largely unchanged from its inception in the 20th century.

Cmail – Dawn of a New Era

So as many of you already know through reading the Sun or word of mouth, Cornell WebMail has now been skinned with Gmail to form Cmail. Curious, I decided to take it for a spin and try it out.

Once I had set up the account, the resulting page looked a lot like my iGoogle home page, only with a giant banner on the top of the page reminding me that I’m looking at a Cornell-run page instead of my own.

Certainly this is a general improvement over the fiasco that is Cornell’s own server (remember when course enroll started and the server went down several times?), but it’s not perfect, and I’ll tell you why: