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Freshman Jessica Brenay has two primary e-mail addresses, one through IU Webmail and the other through America Online. When she wants to send something important or official, she logs into her IU Webmail account.\n"I do have another account, but I don't forward my e-mail to it," Brenay said. "I only give my school e-mail address to school-related things, so then when I go to it, there's no junk mail, and I don't have to sort it."\nWhile the majority of IU students are like Brenay and stick with IU Webmail as their primary source of sending and receiving, a large number are using Webmail's forwarding options to use free e-mail services like AOL's instant messenger e-mail service, Yahoo! and Google's Gmail.\nUniversity Information Technology Services messaging manager Rick Jackson said about 11,682 out of 110,000 IU-Bloomington accounts, about 10 percent, forward their e-mail to outside service providers. Last summer, the numbers for all of IU's campuses showed 37,686 out of 203,000 users, about 19 percent, forwarded their e-mail to some service outside the IU system.\nOf these outside e-mail providers, Google's Gmail is one of the most popular, ranked No. 2 on PC World's "100 Best Products of 2005" list.\nJunior Patrick Janisch switched to Gmail about a month ago, and he said he has been nothing but happy with it.\n"I never really liked Webmail and always looked for an alternative," Janisch said in an e-mail. "With Gmail, they give you so much space (about 3 gigabytes) so you never have to delete an e-mail. They have a nice search feature that allows you find an e-mail that you are looking for easily."\nJanisch also said he thinks Gmail's spam filter and virus protection is great because he has not had to deal with spam e-mail in his inbox since he switched. He also said he likes the layout of Gmail. \nJunior Kara Howard said she began forwarding mail before the beginning of this school year because of problems she had with the Webmail system in the past.\n"At the time, it had virtually no storage space," Howard said in an e-mail. "It took forever to load and a ton of spam came through."\nHoward said the last straw for her was when she was writing an e-mail to an important individual and the message got sent while she was in the middle of composing it.\nJackson admitted delays do happen sometimes with the Webmail system, but when they do, faculty and administration know about them.\n"Because e-mail is used for official communication, it is in the students' best interest for them to keep their mail here," Jackson said. "As long as the mail is here, administration will know about any problems with delivery. If it is not here, then one must assume the student has received the mail."\nJackson said this is a likely explanation for why most students do not choose to forward their e-mail outside of Webmail. He said the unpredictability of Internet e-mail is another possible cause.\n"Reliability of Internet bound e-mail has decreased because of spam and other factors, like viruses, that can cause delivery or even messages to not be delivered," he said in an e-mail.\nUITS warns on its Web site that choosing to forward e-mail from the official University account can be a risk. Students are expected to read their e-mail frequently for official school communication, and an outside system error can prevent important information from being delivered.\n"Mail being sent from IU to other accounts is completely outside of the University control," Jackson said. "We have no way of knowing what happens to that mail once it leaves IU, we can only determine that the target mail system accepted our connection or not."\nFor this reason, Brenay has no plans to ever forward her Webmail account to any outside source.\n"I don't know if I would trust it being forwarded to AOL, just because I've had mail sent to AOL not be there or get deleted," she said.