Joke Issue: Engineering School to switch to AOL email

America Online email service has gotten its first university customer.

The Computing and Educational Technology Services Department of the School of Engineering and Applied Science has recently finished an internal alpha test with AOL’s email service. Over the next year, all engineering students will be required to switch to AOL from their current SEAS emails as the Engineering school shuts down its own email servers.

Last month, the College announced it would switch to Google’s servers for its email service.

“Gmail is too experimental,” said Ira Winston, executive director of Computing and Educational Technology Services Department. “AOL has years of email experience on us.” He added that “with so many years of experience, AOL must know what they are doing.”

“The internal alpha tests went stunningly and we are moving ahead as planned,” Winston said.

Certain students are very unhappy about the switch.

“During my childhood, I heard my father swearing at the computer because of AOL crashing again,” Engineering junior Rohan Patel said.

Eduardo Glandt, dean of Engineering, said students do not need “the fancy features of Google Apps, such as Google Docs and Google Calendar.”

“Back in my post-doc days, you were happy if your email inbox simply loaded,” he said.

However, Engineering freshman Wangwei Li is overwhelmed with the nostalgia associated with AOL. “It reminds me of the good old days when I used to spend all my time on Neopets,” she said.

In addition, Winston is also hoping to tackle the problem of unreliable internet signal in certain buildings in the Engineering Quad.

“Nothing’s certain right now, but AOL has promised a bundle discount on AOL dial-up internet services if we switch to their email service,” Winston said.

For more information, check out this related story.

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