
College Stops Giving Students New Email Accounts - beaudeal
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/college_stops_giving_students_new_email_accounts.php
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Goronmon
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.

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tialys
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
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
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?

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endtwist
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.

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

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pyroman
> 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.

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snprbob86
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
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.

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tsally
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.

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kylec
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.

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bfioca
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...

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aneesh
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.

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graywh
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.)

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jdminhbg
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.

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vaksel
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

