Welcome back to Bwog's latest feature, "In Defense Of..." Here, a writer defends something that most students consider useless, inferior, or downright loathsome. In doing so, Bwog hopes to bring you a new perspective, and give the subject the appreciation it deserves...or not. This time, you guessed it, it's CubMail.

Although google is taking over the world and accruing more and more gmail fanatics by the hour, there remain a few traditional CubMail users. I am proud to be one among them.

The simplicity of CubMail is what I like best. The terseness of the email addresses it provides lends itself to people with long, cumbersome, hard to spell names. With CubMail, Maria Elena Quintana becomes a tidy MQ2139. To follow the gmail trend, I would have to go with some like mariaelena.quintana, which eliminates the all important space between my first and second name and leaves me with stuck with an unpronounceable string of vowels in the middle. If I threw in an additional dot, I would get maria.elena.quintana, which is more aesthetically pleasing than the former but ultimately just as confusing. In this situation, Elena could easily be mistook for my middle name, which would leave me as Maria and cause an identity crisis among other confusing things.

Free TimesSelect is here with the wave of your Columbia/Barnard email address.

And although you have to give your CU email to the Times, (and to all your professors and Michelle Diamond and Lee Bollinger and Austin [!] Quigley), that doesn't mean you have to deal with CubMail, Columbia's the homage to 2002's latest technologies. After the jump is Mark Holden's guide to forwarding email to Gmail. It ran about a year ago and remains some of the most usable and earnest advice Bwog's ever given.

Being a Columbia student means dealing with e-mail. Craploads of it. You have an account through the school, but you'd do yourself a favor by getting a colorful Gmail account from our friends at Google. Why? Infinite storage space, accessibility from any computer, rapid-fire messages that don't clutter your inbox, the best spam filter available, and a fun chat feature! Bwog staffer Mark Holden offers this guide to the best e-mail system out there.

Step 1: Join the club

First, you need to get a Gmail account. (If you already have one, skip to the next paragraph.) As we'll see shortly, your account name doesn't matter, so sign up for whatever's available. If you have a cell phone (you do have one, right? you are a college student, right?), you can sign up directly at www.gmail.com; if you don't, you need to find a friend to invite you; if that fails, try emailing hottchik6969@gmail.com for one (read on to find out); if all of the above fail, look here for more options. So get Gmail and come back when you're done. Bookmark this page if necessary. I'll wait...

...Done? Good! Next, we need to forward all your Columbia mail to Gmail. To do that, log in to Cubmail, go to options, then delivery settings, then "edit your delivery settings," then "edit your email delivery settings," then "Login to edit your UNI account," then about 2/3rds down click "Email forwarding." (Do you still wonder why you're switching? Good grief.) Enter your new Gmail address and click save. Phew!