College Stops Giving Students New Email Accounts

College Stops Giving Students New Email Accounts(readwriteweb.com)

19 points by beaudeal 17 years ago | 19 comments

Goronmon 17 years ago |

I'll use this opportunity to complain about experience with college e-mail.

For the last year and half of college I was having a tough time getting announcements for stuff that everyone but me seemed to know about and I seemed to be occasionally missing events and e-mail conversations with groups for certain classes. I wrote it off as me just not paying enough attention to e-mails and notices.

Then I realized right near the end of college that I was actually was missing a significant portion of my e-mails. This was due to the fact that while I normally used the webmail client, one time I had logged into the Exchange client to try it out. Apparently when that happened my e-mail was being randomly grabbed by whichever server was the quickest at that particular moment. Since I never checked the Exchange account I didn't realize until after the fact that it contained hundreds of important e-mails that would have made my college life much easier if I had known about. I'll, I'm probably partially to blame if I missed some warning somewhere during the process that indicated that this could happen.

Still though, I would have much preferred not having to deal with the school's e-mail system so this type of change is definitely for the better in my mind.

Edit: Plus, as others have mentioned, you generally lose access to that e-mail address once you graduate, meaning you need to transition all your contacts to a new account anyways.

tialys 17 years ago |

I think this is an excellent idea, however from the standpoint of someone who provides tech support to students at my university, this would be a disaster for a good portion of the student body. A good number of people here can barely turn on a computer (and we GIVE THEM a laptop). Assuming that people have an identity established seems logical, but is still too early. Some may say these are outliers, however looking at our support tickets, I'd say a good number of people have one email address, and thats the one we give them.

Goronmon 17 years ago | |

How big of a difference is it between creating and maintaining an e-mail address for each student, and instructing students as to how to create an e-mail account with say Gmail, for instance?

In both cases the student needs to figure out how to access a mail system in order to actually use the e-mail address.

pyroman 17 years ago | | |

Also, a lot of universities have their application process online and require an e-mail address to apply. So the information is already available and that would eliminate the step of requiring the student to set up forwarding manually.

If it's already a method of contact between you and the university, why add another place to look by creating a separate inbox?

cabalamat 17 years ago | |

Aren't people who go to university meant to be fairly bright? If they can't figure out email, they probably wouldn't benefit from a university education anyway.

breily 17 years ago | | |

I do tech support part time for students at my school, and I have to agree with the parent. I'm astounded every day by how bad some people are with computers. We have normal email accounts here, and people still have trouble figuring out to use them. I personally think its a great idea (the first thing I did when I got to school was forward my school account), but I'll bet 75% of the people wouldn't be able to figure it out.

endtwist 17 years ago |

While in all likelihood, this was done for cost-cutting purposes (as the article states), I actually like the idea.

I'm a college student myself, and while I have an email address with the school, I just have all my mail forwarded from that account (which uses the awful Outlook Web interface and doesn't offer PHP3 or IMAP) to my GMail account. It's considerably more convenient.

Some people will probably disagree with me, but even if more colleges just offered the option to make your account either a full account or simply a forwarding address (as opposed to just forwarding mail from the mailbox, as my account does), it would be worthwhile.

endtwist 17 years ago | |

Erm...too late to edit it now, but that should have read POP3. Yeesh.

pyroman 17 years ago |

> They considered offering from both Google and Microsoft, but eventually decided against both in lieu of the new forwarding option.

UCF recently had to make this decision and went with Microsoft. And now our students do not have an option of forwarding those messages to an address of their choice.

snprbob86 17 years ago | |

Sure you do. Microsoft's offering provides a trimmed down Exchange with Outlook Web Access. Simply login to OWA and can create a rule to forward all messages.

pyroman 17 years ago | | |

I've been looking around at the school's interface and at the Windows Live account area and I haven't found anything yet. If https://owa.msoutlookonline.net/Login.aspx is the OWA you are talking about, then I can't log in to that.

I remember someone saying that forwarding was turned off so that people would have to use the web interface. I don't know why they would even make than an option.

tsally 17 years ago |

Right now the quota on my school inbox is so restrictive, I can't keep any significant amount of email history. So I just forward everything to GMail. And don't even get me started on the interface...

I think it's highly unlikely that in house solutions will survive much longer. Forwarding or outsourcing to something like Google Apps are better options by far.

kylec 17 years ago |

Unless your school lets you keep your address forever, I don't understand why people use it at all. At my school once you graduate you lose your school email unless you become a paying member of the alumni association. I just forward all my email to my GMail address and now I don't have to worry about it.

bfioca 17 years ago |

It's interesting that my first thought after reading this was, "I wonder how Facebook will compensate for this?" I know university networks (verified by .edu email addresses) used to be the bread and butter of Facebook but maybe they're already becoming less important...

aneesh 17 years ago | |

The only thing facebook requires to join a university's network is an ability to receive emails sent to yourname@university.edu. Nothing is changing there.

silencio 17 years ago | |

Same here, until I read they were forwarding, which works for me. I never use my college email for anything important beyond a couple of somewhat annoying profs who set their filters to ignore everything but college email addresses and refused to send emails to private email addresses, which even the school itself uses to send information vs. the official .edu address (excuuuuse me if I don't login to the insanely backwards webmail more than once a month if at all, so I miss your email about something along with the entire rest of the class..)...as well as once on facebook, glassdoor, ms dreamspark and like one other time.

Wish more colleges at least gave an option, or did only forwarding as opposed to in-house solutions.

graywh 17 years ago |

The university where I work has provided a forwarding option for a long time now. And just recently started offering Gmail accounts instead of using the university's servers. (I know several universities are doing this to cut costs.)

jdminhbg 17 years ago |

I started college about 11 years ago, and there were people who didn't check their email accounts because they never used email. College email has become ubiquitous and then obsolete in the span of a decade.

vaksel 17 years ago |

well this is better than what most schools do now a days, give you an account for the 4 years, then you lose it when you graduate...along with all the contacts who have that email address. No forwarding or anything like that either