College Stops Giving Students New Email Accounts

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

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.

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

&#62; They considered offering from both Google and Microsoft, but eventually decided against both in lieu of the new forwarding option.<p>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.

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...<p>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.

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.

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...

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.)

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.

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