Steven Taylor has comment on a complaint by a student at another college that a class cancellation was not announced via email. Steven writes:

I also find it amusing because as a professor who does use e-mail quite extensively (and yes, I do send it when I know I have to cancel, if at all possible), many of [my] students don’t always read it. Further, most of my colleagues don’t maintain mailing lists for their classes, so couldn’t send a mass e-mail if they wanted to do so.

I have to say I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the pervasiveness of e-mail at Millsaps, even if I could do without the idiosyncracies of Microsoft Outlook and its web interface. We have mailing lists for every class and—critically—the students have been acculturized into using and checking it. Of course, it helps that almost everyone lives on campus and virtually everyone who does has a computer in their room, if not one of their own.