Death to Webmail

At IU, many of us have the privilege (read: frustration) of logging into IU Webmail. Cascades of spam fill our inboxes, while the pitiful inbox limit of 100 megabytes runs out far too quickly with all the e-mail attachments necessary in the life of a college student. \n We can’t be assured of our e-mail security, and downtime often plagues the servers. In case you hadn’t heard, a pilot program to revamp IU’s Webmail has begun to remedy these problems, attempting to make the Web client easier to navigate with more options, replicating the features of popular Web-based clients such as Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo.\nWe have a better idea. Rather than spending tons of money trying to emulate them, we could just use one of these companies as our e-mail clients. According to a report in the Chronicle Of Higher Education, Microsoft and Google are now competing to get their Web-based application suites used by colleges and universities nationwide, each with their own popular e-mail clients packaged in. How many of us already forward our university mail to Gmail or Hotmail accounts? Why not just skip the middleman and outsource our e-mail to a company that does it a lot better than we do?\nRemember how IU’s user names and passwords were hacked through a phishing scam? Well, according to U.S. News and World Report article from Aug. 22, “most university IT managers agree that outsiders would do a better job protecting individual e-mail from viruses and spam than their own small operations.” When it comes to network security, IU no longer has the sophistication that private companies can provide.\nWhen we outsource something such as the motor pool or the IU Bookstore, we’re changing something that ends up being only marginally different for those people using it. The cars are still cars; the books gouge us just like they did before. But with e-mail clients, the alternate product is actually far improved from our own, with larger server space and less downtime.\nThe Chronicle also notes a few small but important advantages of outsourced e-mail. For one thing, you can keep your e-mail after you graduate from IU. This is great for us as students, but additionally great for the University, as it allows it to continue to contact alumni after they graduate. Plus, these suites provide features such as instant messaging, mobile updates and blogging that IU’s Webmail cannot provide.\nThere was a time when university-provided e-mail was an exclusive perk unavailable to those outside the system. But these days, with companies far more adept at managing e-mail servers than IU, it won’t be long before universities are out of the e-mail hosting business altogether. With technology behemoths such as Microsoft and Google competing to provide the best service to universities in communications and productivity packages, it seems silly to continue renovating a system we don’t really need. Why not help lead the charge rather than fall behind and straggle across the finish line?