Sixteen percent of Mississippi State University students forward their campus e-mail to Gmail or another host.
Incoming Student Association Vice President, Rhett Hobart, said he wants to address this issue and has recommend switching MSU e-mail over to Gmail.
“When looking at my goals and priorities if elected SA Vice President, I knew that one of the main issues I wanted to combat was the e-mail system, and the many problems and limitations which surround our current system,” Hobart said. “I began speaking with student leaders at many of our peer institutions around the SEC to see what they had done to combat this issue. After speaking with the Student Body President at LSU, I learned that they had recently changed all student e-mail over to Gmail. We discussed in depth the benefits of that system and I began looking into our WebMail system and how a system like this could work at Mississippi State.”
As it is now, MSU university WebMail contains about 20 MB of space for each student which limits the e-mail account to around 300 emails, Hobart said.
Hobart said if MSU was to switch over to Gmail, students could keep their same e-mail address, [email protected], but would have 350 times the capacity, up to 7,500 MB of space for e-mails and an extra 2,000 MB for things such as GoogleDocs.
“The benefits of this change to Gmail are astounding and offer a multitude of features for the student body,” Hobart said. “Not only would students increase their e-mail capacity, but they would also gain access to GoogleDocs, which can be extremely beneficial for students working on group projects or even to simply store documents or files on the Google server and eliminate the use of flash drives.”
Before Hobart’s campaign, he talked to ITS director Mike Rackley to discuss possibly changing the e-mail system. They sat down with other ITS administrators, discussed the issue and all agreed that Gmail would be a viable alternative.
“Our ITS department does a great job of being pro-active in looking into issues that are in the best interest of the students and trying to do all they can to make sure the students have the best technology in the industry,” Hobart said.
Rackley said he agrees Gmail would be a wonderful alternative and it is being considered as an option.
“No final decision has been made, nor will it be made, until we’re confident we’ve done a thorough investigation and we’ve had an opportunity to talk with the various groups that might be impacted by such a decision,” Rackley said.
Junior communication major Mary Allison North said she thinks Gmail would be a great change from MSU’s current Web mail system.
“As a student, I like to keep most of my e-mails around in order to reference them in the future, with having such limited space, this sometimes gets hard to do,” North said. “So I really like the idea of having more storage space for my e-mails. I really hope this happens, so I can utilize it before I graduate.”
Hobart said at a time when e-mail is becoming more and more prominent in daily and classroom communication, this could truly be beneficial to the student body at Mississippi State.