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DU student e-mail accounts may disappear as early as fall 2011, according to Ken Stafford, vice chancellor of technology.
The university currently is looking into options such as eliminating DU student e-mail accounts altogether. No official decisions have been made, but Stafford said he is leaning toward having students register an official e-mail address from another server, such as Google or Yahoo.
“A lot of students don’t want DU e-mail,” Stafford said. “We’ll make a decision as soon as we get all the ideas in.”
The current e-mail system through Sun Java systems is six years old and at the end of a typical lifespan, Stafford said. It would cost $350,000 to replace.
“We haven’t actually made a formal proposal for what we’re doing,” he said. “We think it’s the best way to go as do a lot of others, and we just have the details to work out.”
The reaction from students is mixed.
“I definitely think the current system is broken in that it isn’t really helping anyone,” said junior Dillon Doyle. “But I don’t think just doing away with e-mail and completely disregarding all graduates e-mail address and leaving them to fend for themselves is smart or very kind. I think if we just completely get rid of them it will send thousands and hundreds of thousand into Neverland they’ll never get delivered.”
The current DU e-mail system has life-long mail forwarding for alumni,which raises concern for the new system, but Stafford said the university is trying to come up with a program to replace this.
But other students said they would miss the university affiliation and how easy it is to contact students, alumni and professors.
“I use DU and Gmail,” said Lalu Abebe, senior. “I really like having a DU e-mail and being affiliated with the university. For that reason, I would be opposed to getting rid of it.
“I rely pretty heavily on the directory system,” she said.
There would still be a DU directory through the Banner system with the student’s e-mail of choice. The university would provide a .edu proxy for student downloads. For legal reasons, faculty and staff will still have DU e-mail addresses.
“You lose some professionalism. That’s what I think will impact me in applying for jobs and grad schools,” Abebe said.
Others said they would be fine getting rid of DU’s e-mail and it would not be an inconvenience.
“It seems like a waste of resources, especially when most people use other e-mail,” said Javier Ogaz, senior.
Ogaz has had his e-mail forwarded to a personal account for the last year because he said it was easier with an off-campus connection.
I believe that free services, such as Gmail or Hotmail are superior to DU’s own system,” Ogaz said. “
DU spends around $100,000 per year on security initiatives. On average, the university blocks 2 million spam messages a day. On a bad day, the DU mail server is hit with 24 million spam e-mails. This is separate from the e-mails DU marks that “appear suspicious.”
The money saved would go to other university projects and the student tech fee would remain in place.
Stafford said more than half of DU students forward their e-mail to another account, which is a problem when it comes to blocking spam. When mail is forwarded, spam messages are not blocked, resulting in the du.edu proxy being blacklisted, meaning all e-mails sent from the DU server are blocked.
Earlier in the search for a new e-mail system, DU was considering Gmail, however Google could not guarantee privacy and according to Stafford, the university couldn’t receive answers on the process for holding or archiving e-mails for legal issues.
Last week, Yale University decided against changing over to Google as an e-mail provider.
