Universities across the country change e-mail systems

By Josh Kalil
Western Herald

Chyn Wey Lee/Western Herald: Western Michigan University computers display the GoWMU homepage in Waldo Library.

As most students come into college with their own personal e-mail address, some universities are getting rid of the university e-mail accounts.

Boston College announced on Nov. 19 that they would stop offering new university e-mail accounts to students. Rather, they will assign each student an address that forwards, according to a Nov. 19 article from The Chronicle of Higher Education.

A report from EDUCAUSE shows that in 2008 10 percent of associate, baccalaureate, and master’s institutions are thinking about getting rid of such accounts, up from one to two percent in 2004.

This is something that Gregory Lozeau, Director of IT Planning and Policy Development, said that WMU is not interested in.

“We don’t have any plans for what we’ll call cloud e-mail services,” Lozeau said. “You aren’t possessing a hardware, someone else is.”

The cloud e-mail services would be anything where WMU has to use someone else to transfer e-mails. Free e-mail accounts like Hotmail and Google would be examples of the cloud e-mail services.

WMU would not have as much control over the data with an e-mail service like Google or AOL acting as the go between.

“You can’t guarantee delivery of what you don’t have control of,” Lozeau said. “As you start using these services that you don’t own, how well protected is that data?”

Some e-mail servers, like Google, could have e-mail marked as spam from some WMU accounts. If Google automatically started to mark all WMU e-mail as spam students might not get things they actually want to read,” “All on one would definitely be cost saving,” Lozeau said.

Changes are planned for WMU e-mail, but in terms of the e-mail clients it uses.

Currently, WMU is working on condensing the two e-mail servers for students and faculty into one.

“The majority of our faculty and staff are on Groupwise and the students are on Webmail,” Lozeau said. “We are reluctant to let our data be put somewhere else.”

With everybody using one client, maintenance costs will go down, with the price based solely on the number of inboxes WMU uses.

Merit Mail is an Internet service provider that, according to Lozeau, would let WMU keep track of it’s own data. This isn’t possible with services like Google or AOL. Merit Mail is already being used at Eastern Michigan University, Wayne State University, and Central Michigan University.

The Zimbra e-mail client would replace both Groupwise and Webmail if adopted, according to Lozeau.

“Zimbra allows students to share calendars and plug into mobile devices,” Lozeau said.

For some students, which e-mail client WMU uses is a non-issue.

“For anything non-school related, I use my Hotmail account,” Brent Simon, a bio-medical sciences major at WMU, said.

Simon said he wouldn’t mind the two mixing, it’s just he knows that the WMU account will not be around forever.

“I know they close your account after you graduate. I don’t have a problem with all my e-mail in my Hotmail account,” Simon said.

Lozeau said @wmich.edu accounts are terminated two years after graduation. Students are given notices so they have adequate time to relay contacts to a new e-mail address, but that doesn’t mean it’s not an inconvenience.

“Of students who graduated in 2008, 50 percent are still using the accounts,” Lozeau said.

Tonya Greenwood, a WMU alumnus, has already taken steps to moving on from the WMU e-mail accounts.

“I know they are going to expire sometime,” Greenwood said. “If I wasn’t going to graduate school at [the University of Michigan], it might be a bigger deal. I just have to switch it over to my new school e-mail.”

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Posted by heraldstaff on Nov 29 2009. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

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