Comments on: IRT pondering switching e-mail to Gmail http://www.tommiemedia.com/news/irt-pondering-switching-e-mail-to-gmail/ Campus, local and world news reported daily by University of St. Thomas students Mon, 06 Feb 2012 03:14:33 -0600 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 hourly 1 By: James Heaney http://www.tommiemedia.com/news/irt-pondering-switching-e-mail-to-gmail/comment-page-1/#comment-961 James Heaney Fri, 13 Nov 2009 13:38:52 +0000 http://www.tommiemedia.com/?p=3223#comment-961 I'll be honest: I've been forwarding all my UST email directly to my Gmail inbox since I started as a freshman. It's annoying at times -- the forwarding process typically strips out the original sender's email, so I spend a lot of time looking up UST email addresses in the directory, but it's very worth it to have all my email coming into one place, which is an account owned by me which I can continue using indefinitely. That'll save a lot of hassle when I graduate from college; no sending out emails to all my colleagues to tell them my address has changed. I would love to see the "Gmail Option" come to fruition. It helps that -- no offense to IRT -- Gmail has used its stellar hiring pool and enormous economies of scale to make Gmail the finest-tuned piece of email software on the planet. It's reliable, efficient, somewhat extensible (thank you, Greasemonkey!), and some of those features in Gmail Labs are downright game-changing. UST email, by contrast, still has a bit of trouble remaining online throughout campus during the day, and its interface is basically a stripped-down Outlook, which is the opposite of awesome. So, definitely, there are huge practical, daily benefits in a relationship with Google. That being said, Mr. Levy's quite right to be skeptical, because he can't just be concerned about the daily, practical benefits. He has to be concerned about possible disasters, including privacy of content and backup in case Gmail fails. The cloud is useful, but you can't trust the cloud. (I wonder whether some variation of Offline Gmail has been considered, so UST students could access their most recent emails even if the service temporarily -- or permanently -- goes down.) I hope that these concerns can be resolved to IRT's satisfaction, however, as moving UST over to Gmail would be a great leap forward, not only for the school's budget, but for user satisfaction. Ooo! And can we get a UST purple-and-white Gmail skin? 'cuz that'd just be awesome. I’ll be honest: I’ve been forwarding all my UST email directly to my Gmail inbox since I started as a freshman. It’s annoying at times — the forwarding process typically strips out the original sender’s email, so I spend a lot of time looking up UST email addresses in the directory, but it’s very worth it to have all my email coming into one place, which is an account owned by me which I can continue using indefinitely. That’ll save a lot of hassle when I graduate from college; no sending out emails to all my colleagues to tell them my address has changed. I would love to see the “Gmail Option” come to fruition.

It helps that — no offense to IRT — Gmail has used its stellar hiring pool and enormous economies of scale to make Gmail the finest-tuned piece of email software on the planet. It’s reliable, efficient, somewhat extensible (thank you, Greasemonkey!), and some of those features in Gmail Labs are downright game-changing. UST email, by contrast, still has a bit of trouble remaining online throughout campus during the day, and its interface is basically a stripped-down Outlook, which is the opposite of awesome. So, definitely, there are huge practical, daily benefits in a relationship with Google.

That being said, Mr. Levy’s quite right to be skeptical, because he can’t just be concerned about the daily, practical benefits. He has to be concerned about possible disasters, including privacy of content and backup in case Gmail fails. The cloud is useful, but you can’t trust the cloud. (I wonder whether some variation of Offline Gmail has been considered, so UST students could access their most recent emails even if the service temporarily — or permanently — goes down.) I hope that these concerns can be resolved to IRT’s satisfaction, however, as moving UST over to Gmail would be a great leap forward, not only for the school’s budget, but for user satisfaction.

Ooo! And can we get a UST purple-and-white Gmail skin? ‘cuz that’d just be awesome.

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