Most Internet users are at least vaguely familiar with e-mail providers such as Gmail, Yahoo and MSN, which dominate the electronic mail sphere. But college students across the country may soon become even more acquainted with these providers as universities begin outsourcing their once school-run e-mail clients to larger corporate carriers.
Recently, both Northwestern University and the University of Pennsylvania have contracted with Google and Windows Live, respectively, to offer students what they consider better and more efficient e-mail services.
The call for better e-mail services at Northwestern came from the student government.
"Our student government indicated that they wanted to us to improve student e-mail and collaboration services," Wendy Woodward, the director of Northwestern University's Technology Support Services, told the Daily in an e-mail.
From there, the technology department began investigating other carriers and solutions to its e-mail dilemma. They stumbled upon Google Apps Education Edition, a service offered free to colleges and universities that boasts its ability to facilitate communication, collaboration and publication on the Web.
At Northwestern, the driving reason students wanted a change in their e-mail service was the application's potential for online collaboration.
"It provides services that we did not previous provide such as online document sharing and storage, [instant messaging] and calendaring, in addition to large, feature-rich e-mail boxes," Woodward said. She said these features would facilitate both communication and the ability to collaborate on things like group projects directly over the Internet.
Dawn Irish, associate director of outreach at Tufts University Information Technology, said Tufts does not plan on changing its e-mail provider. "For the foreseeable future we'll stick with the internal e-mail service," she said.
Irish cited many advantages Tufts sees in keeping its e-mail services internal, rather than joining other schools in outsourcing.
"The biggest [advantage] is having a 'Tufts.edu' address. Going to a prestigious university like Tufts comes with having an address at that university," Irish said. The Trumpeter service Tufts currently uses offers students "the affiliation with the university," she said, which can turn out to be powerful when applying for jobs after graduation.
According to Irish, the university-wide e-mail format that Trumpeter provides is convenient, aiding in communication between students and professors at the university. "All of the administrative offices need a way to communicate with everyone; knowing that every student has a first.last@tufts.edu makes it a lot easier for them," she said.
Both Windows' and Google's e-mail applications for colleges address that concern, as both services offer e-mail addresses with the university's domain as their extension.
According to the Google application's Web page, it allows universities to "select any combination of [Google's] available tools and services and customize them with [the] school's logo, color scheme and content."
But another important advantage of keeping Tufts' e-mail system internal is the privacy that an internally-maintained system offers, according to UIT employee Collin Murphy.
"Google's privacy policy is pretty open and vague," Murphy said.
Irish agreed.
"One of the things [Google] certainly does is to scan for key words in e-mails to advertise to you based on words that appear in your e-mails," Irish said. "Privacy is a big thing at a research university. A lot of students are very squeamish about that type of monitoring. Students could be working on a research project or something, and a lot of that information is very confidential because it can be very competitive."
"Having the security of knowing that your e-mail isn't being scanned or the content is not sold to different advertisers is a big benefit," she added.
Irish's concern is one reservation other schools have had over hosting their mail services with Google and Microsoft. As a result, both companies are offering their services free of advertisements. As they are also free of charge, they offer the two software giants little but branding and marketing in return for their services.
For schools who have switched services, the change has provided significant financial advantages to participating universities.
According to U.S. News and World Report, both Northwestern and the University of Pennsylvania saved about $1 million dollars in technology support costs by outsourcing their e-mail services.
The sheer size of the e-mail storage offered by larger programs is also attractive to many schools. With Microsoft Live educational e-mail, students are offered two gigabytes, and Gmail currently offers over five gigabytes of storage to its clients. Although Tufts UIT has increased the student e-mail quota twice in the past six months, it currently offers students just 500 megabytes of storage space.
Irish said Tufts UIT offers several solutions to students to offset the differences between internal and outsourced e-mail systems. Students have the opportunity to install an interface client such as Mozilla Thunderbird or Windows Outlook to access their Tufts e-mail, or they may forward their school e-mail to a personal account.
