A couple of weeks ago I wrote about my Bachelor's Thesis but what I didn't expect at that point was how quickly my studies would end afterwards due to some "features" of services I use but - to be honest - mainly my own mistakes:
At some point a month ago my Google Drive - which I extended to be 1 TB - was full because my NAS was constanty uploading encrypted backups to it. But the thing about Google Drive storage is that if you pay for it all Google services share that storage including Gmail. Therefore when my Google Drive storage was filed up so was my Gmail storage and I couldn't receive any further emails or email forwards from my other email adresses anymore.
But luckily my university is using an Outlook server for the student mail addresses. And because Outlook is very smart after to many bounced emails (emails that couldn't be delivered) it automatically deisabled the email forward without me noticing. Later on I googled for it but couldn't find that behaviour documented anywhere.
When I removed the backups and freed up the storage I didn't realize I wasn't receiving university emails anymore as I receive like a lot mails each day and it was holiday season so I didn't expected to receive a lot of university emails anyway. But still I was waiting for the grades of my last exam and my bachelor grades because to keep the student status I had to reply quickly after receiving it.
So last Monday I wrote them a mail from my university's mail address - I have Gmail configured to use my university's SMTP so I can send mails from my university address directly without going to Outlook - asking about the grades but didn't receive an answer so I asked again on Wednesday. On Friday I got my exmatriculation letter in the mail and wrote them again but still no answer. So today I called them and they were a little pissed and told me they wrote me lots of mails in the past days including my grades and replies to all my questions...
So I checked my university mail account directly and found all the mails I missed - especially the one that told me my bachelor grades and requested me to response quickly to keep my student status. But the deadline was already passed - and therefore I graduated by accident.
So yeah - I think I can understand not tech-savvy people's frustration with IT Systems now as the finishing point of my studies. So it's a good thing after all I suppose...
