Incoming Student Association Vice President Rhett Hobart is pushing for Mississippi State to change its current Web mail service to Google Mail. This was one of the best ideas I saw on the SA candidates’ platforms before the election, and I am glad to see it is likely to happen.
Gmail would have enormous advantages over MSU WebMail. Where do I even begin?
First of all, the sheer capacity of Gmail is reason enough to switch. As The Reflector reported two weeks ago, Gmail would provide MSU students 350 times the capacity of WebMail.
Whereas each student currently has only 20 MB of space and has to clear out his or her inbox after receiving about 300 messages, Gmail offers 7,500 MB of space plus another 2,000 MB for additional features like GoogleDocs. I have been using a Gmail account for the majority of my e-mail since May 2005, and I have only used 9 percent of my space; that’s 722 MB out of a total 7,436 MB of space. I haven’t had to delete any of the 7,488 messages I have received in my inbox since 2005.
Secondly, as many of us have probably found, MSU WebMail is glitchy. E-mail messages often seem slow to reach their destinations if they go through at all, especially if they carry attachments. This makes it very difficult for students and instructors to e-mail documents to each other.
In some of my classes over the last few semesters, it got to the point where everyone had to give the instructor their personal e-mail address. Rarely do I risk sending a professor a research paper over WebMail. One of my professors doesn’t even give out his MSU e-mail address, opting to use a Yahoo! account specifically created to receive messages from students.
Furthermore, MSU WebMail has been prone to spam, which has caused people’s computers to get viruses according to a Reflector report from last semester. E-mail providers such as Gmail, Comcast and AOL Mail have sometimes had to blacklist all MSU WebMail accounts. While our current e-mail system does a pretty good job of rooting out spam, Gmail is also very efficient in this respect, maybe even better.
I also do not find MSU WebMail’s interface very user-friendly. Gmail, however, is very simple and offers more features.
Many other schools in our region have adopted Gmail, including LSU, Mississippi College and Vanderbilt. It’s time for us to hop aboard. Gmail will offer a world of difference in the way we use our MSU e-mail if the university chooses to go in that direction. Besides, a lot of students already have their MSU e-mail automatically forwarded to their Gmail account.
It’s nice to see that our vice president-elect has already begun to push for practical changes by meeting with MSU’s ITS and student leaders at other universities. When I looked at the SA candidates’ platforms earlier this semester, I was looking for specific ideas. This is an idea that would affect all MSU students for the better and would make many of the everyday academic activities at this university more efficient.
Matt Watson is a graduate student majoring in Spanish. He can be contacted at [email protected].