This afternoon I discovered that I’ve officially been accepted to the MSc programme in Maths at UCT. But how did I discover this? I received an automated email from ICTS (UCT’s IT administration) that said “Dear Post-Honors Student, A new email address has been created for you in the Name.Surname format…” So I figured, “OK, they’ve given me a new email address, I guess that means I’ve been accepted.” And indeed, when I checked Peoplesoft (the student admin system) there was a green tick in the Admissions section that hadn’t been there before.
Now, it doesn’t really bother me to find out this way, since in my case the official acceptance is just a technicality. But in general it seems like the best way to inform prospective students that they’ve been accepted is not through an automated notice about an email alias creation. Of course a proper signed letter is in the post as I write, but, y’know, it might be nice to send an email saying “Congratulations, you’re in” before sending one saying “Here’s your email account”.
Oh yes, and they could try to spell “Honours” properly, too.
If this regexp matches in the body of any email sent to me, it is /dev/null’ed. I use procmail. Yours would have escaped by a whisker.
have a new email address!.*yahoo