You may have seen my recent rant about the University of Reading’s e-mail software. I got so fed up, in fact, that I decided to do something about it.

That something was to “migrate” my University e-mail to Google Mail. With a release a few months ago, Google gave Mail the complete toolset you need to get it to act as a mail client for your Uni account – seamlessly. This wasn’t the only reason, though – with a Google account, the mail and contacts sync much better with my Nexus One.

Here’s how I migrated so you can too – in about 15 minutes.

I was always under the impression that part of the point of University was to help get people ready to go out into the real world and make a contribution to society.

I can’t help but thinking that the University is trying to not help us in its use of mail software.

“Prayer” (the name of the service, and also what we regularly do when we need to receive an important e-mail) seems to have recently been re-branded as an IT Services thing, but it originally started out as an open-source project at the University of Cambridge.

I’m almost fairly certain that it would never ever be used in a corporate environment. Here’s why.