Editorial: Weighing E-mail Option

While logging on to a Fresno State e-mail account, has an information box ever popped up on your screen warning you that your mailbox was 90 percent full?

Have you ever looked at the bottom of your e-mail homepage and noticed that it only holds 10 megabytes (MB) but offers you storage space for unlimited messages?

With so many other choices like MSN Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and the new Gmail created by Google, the benefits of having a campus e-mail account seem to be limited.

Even cost is not an issue anymore because all the accounts listed above offer free service to anyone with Internet access. Our current e-mail system is also free to students and faculty but lags behind the others in capacity, dependability and popularity.

Campus e-mail is convenient

Besides providing students with instant e-mail access and general services including sending e-mails and attachments, campus e-mail allows students to receive messages from the financial aid office, admissions and evaluations.

Through campus e-mail students can even be notified of upcoming events such as Dog Days, new student orientation, the arrival of library books from the off-campus warehouse and other general correspondence. The benefits stop there.

Capacity limited

How much of e-mail capacity is filled up with unnecessary SPAM? How many college students are in need of estrogen shots or VIAGRA and CIALLIS for erectile dysfunction?

Web space technology is becoming cheaper and cheaper. Why can’t administration use some of the state money earmarked for campus infrastructure improvements to increase e-mail capacity?

Hotmail offers 250MB for free and additional storage for a small monthly fee. Yahoo offers one GB (1024MB) and Gmail takes the cake by offering users more than 2600MB, all for free.

Dependability

Security is always a welcome feature. But it becomes annoying when students logging on to campus e-mail accounts while visiting another site simultaneously, are met with an information box telling them to log on again for security reasons.

Several students on campus have also experienced peculiar things with their e-mail accounts; responses from contacts in their address book about e-mails they received, which they never sent.

Imagine a friend out of the blue asking you about a personal e-mail or an assignment you sent via e-mail that they should not have known about? Scary isn’t it?

In a way, this e-mail system is dependable. Students can depend on it to work correctly about 60 percent of the time and to send e-mails to specific locations. Maybe not the location users intended, but specific destinations nonetheless.

Popularity

Campus email is steadily losing numbers in the popularity contest among students.

Five out of 40 students randomly polled said Fresno State’s e-mail is fine as it is. Ten students said the system is outdated and the other 25 said they don’t really care because they no longer use it.
The 25 students who use other e-mail accounts use Gmail, Hotmail, America Online, Comcast or Yahoo accounts.

Interestingly enough, all 40 students agreed that students are looking for the best offer and do more than simple e-mail on a daily basis.

E-mail maintenance officers at Information Technology Services were not available to comment.

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