In all fairness, I had been sent an email more than a month back, when - on discovering via a groupmail announcing the migration schedule's presence on the ICTS website that I was to be migrated imminently and without warning - I notified the Helpdesk that the timing was most inopportune as I'd be out of Cape Town, requiring ongoing access to my email via WAP. But much had happened in the month, and the exact date was lost among the 8090 other mails in my email inbox, unrecorded on a Netscape Calendar more down than up.
And so, on Saturday morning when I noticed that regular refreshes of my IMAP mailbox revealed no new mail - despite mail having been sent - I became a little bemused. It did finally occur to me that the problem was not with the mail system, but with my presence on it, and I set out to find out whether perhaps I'd been migrated without my knowing.
First stop, I checked the schedule of later-daters, but my name wasn't listed, nor were any dates given. Ah well, not that, then... But some niggling suspicion made me venture to the list of those migrated, to see if, just, maybe... And then the fun started.
To keep the spambots at bay, there is an image that pops up which you have to enter, to gain access to the page. Only... the image changes every 50 seconds. Which is about half the time required for the image to download via dial-up. It felt a bit like those early computer games, when quick fingers were everything. In the end, after about 743 tries, I finally succeeded. The page loaded, and I consulted the list, and yes, I'd been migrated.
I discovered that there is a list of things one is supposed to have done prior to migration - needless to say, I'd not done any - and a list of things to do afterward. Including checking that your IMAP mail is all accounted for... which is a little difficult as the IMAP_inbox, once discovered hiding in something ministerial called "Cabinet", does not report how many messages it contains, displays a max of 200 at a time, and reports all dates as the date of migration written backward (12/8/06 instead of 8/12/06). For 8091 messages? Forget!
This, of course, assumes that one translates your "username you log into the network with" to mean your staff number, with leading zeroes. As a Mac user, I don't log into the UCT network as a rule, and when I do, it's with the FQN... which is not going to get you far with GropeWise. Still, anyone with half a brain cell will eventually get in, and once in, the bliss of seeing an inbox with only 6 real messages (and heaps of spam....) makes it - briefly - worthwhile.