The Death of the College Email Address?
Wednesday, November 4, 2009 by Mike Bertolino Last week The Chronicle of Higher Education wrote a post in their blog, Wired Campus, about colleges doing away with school specific email addresses. One of the main reasons they cite for the inclination to delete the mail accounts is that all of their students already have an email address. I'm pretty sure 99% of students that have applied to colleges or universities since 2003 have one.
Are College E-Mail Addresses on the Way Out? (Chronicle)
It becomes a hassle for students students to check these accounts. Here's a solution to that problem. Gmail allows you to forward email to your account (even Exchange for our non-Snow Leopard readers). It's pretty simple can be found under the "Accounts" tab of the settings page.
Do you find it to tiresome to check more than one email account? Do you have them all hooked up to one? Comment below to share!
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Reader Comments (17)
I actually don't mind having two e-mail accounts. I use my school account for school-related things, as well as for anything where I don't want to give out my non-professional sounding e-mail. The other one is used for just about everything else like e-mail lists that I'm on, newsletters, and other non-essential/fun stuff.
I really don't mind. I maintain a professional gmail address. And i have my school and ROTC email addresses forward to it. And it with gmail's multiple inboxes and filters its very easy to maintain.
Honestly, I love having a university e-mail account. It feels more permanent than my basic Windows Live Mail or a Gmail account. It's also a LOT more professional than that username I chose for my hotmail account, which I made in grade 8 (groan). Honestly, I just have it forwarding to my Live Mail because everything's already set up on it...but I just use it as a pretty face on top of my e-mail and I'm a HUGE fan of that.
I have my college email address (and addresses at my various websites) all forwarding to my email account. Then I can use gmail's support for choosing an address to send from to send email from those accounts easily.
I like having the college email address, because it's an easy way to verify to people that you're a college student (Microsoft's student deals often take advantage of this) and it's nice to be able to put a .edu email address on academia-related materials.
I personally have three separate e-mail accounts that I check - an old ISP e-mail that I use mostly for signups which will generate large amounts of spam, my school account, and my Gmail, which catches the rest of the mail which doesn't go to my ISP or my school account. I have been using Thunderbird for mail forever, and while it may not be the greatest for e-mail, or for RSS feeds, it does both fairly well. Since I run a netbook for class and portability, and my desktop in my room for storage and processing, and both Gmail and my school account (hosted by Gmail) are available for IMAP, I can have copies of the e-mails available on both computers. While this would work the same way with a web-based interface, it is really convenient to have both accounts and select RSS feeds (like HackCollege) updating in the background as I work (or take notes, like I am right now).
While school accounts are a slight pain to use, and may generate a name like jsmi72 for poor John Smith, the benefits outweigh the downsides.
A. Your professors can send out bulk e-mails to the entire class with something like Blackboard
B. You can use it for cheap copies of software, like Windows 7
C. You can use it for applications to grad school and internships
I have 5+ emails automatically forwarding to one gmail account. I have them automatically labeling themselves as well :)
I have all of my email forwarded to one account (hosted at rollernet.us), with corresponding smtp servers for each account so I can also respond to email from the various addresses. It works very well and is much more professional then responding to people's emails with a random name and domain. However, I can see how the less technical savy college students would not take the time to implement a scheme like this.
I have more than ten email addresses (mostly for my different websites), but they all forward to my central gmail address, so I do not have to bother with multiple accounts.
I like having my .edu email address. I just wish with Blackboard, it would forward mail to the .edu email address. I have my .edu email address setup to forward to my gmail account. The .edu is good to have if you want to take advantage of the microsoft .edu discount or apple .edu discounts.
Exactly what you said. All my .edu e-mails get routed to Gmail. Every now and then I accidentally click on 'Webmail' in Blackboard and spend a minute purging hundreds of e-mails. I don't switch to the .edu address to communicate with professors, either. It has never been a problem.
Gmail makes it so easy to have your school account forwarded, you can even have it send emails from your school account!
I've personally always hated college Email addresses. They're just too long and complicated to type out.
This is the way my college (and I'm pretty sure other colleges around the nation) has it laid out:
(first initial) (last name) (number) @ . (state abbreviation) . (college name) .edu
Screw that crap. Thank goodness the professors have Gmail accounts, which I can just simply end with @gmail.com and have it sent to them with no trouble.
All my email (school included) is forwarded to one account... not Gmail. I've never liked Gmail's interface (I'm not worried about the privacy concerns), so I use something better that I'm happy to pay for. I also have my own domain, so nicholas@<domain> is pretty simple. And, of course, I'm easily able to decide which address I want an email to come from.
I own 2 personal e-mail address and 2 others for school and work. I don't really mind additional e-mail addresses because I'm going to stop using the ones for school and work once I'm done with them. I could easily delete those accounts if I want to, just as long as I have my personal ones. :D
Google actually offers free Google Apps mapping including Gmail to any university, which means that college students could have access to .edu email addresses hosted on Google's servers without having to hack through SquirrelMail every week. However, like the reason behind many crappy services, most colleges' IT departments are too power-trippy to allow such a move!
I love having a .edu address. I think it's important to have a dividing line between Academic Andrew and "Extra-Curricular" Andrew.
The college e-mail system shouldn't be intended to be a student's first or only email address; it should be a partitioned part of his/her "cloud" on the internet.
The address on a .edu domain is very beneficial to all parties involved. It's an easy way for the university to contact each and every student. It provides a professional mode of correspondence between students and employers or other formal contacts. And who wants to have their serious messages intermingling with the latest updates on the new Twilight movie or or digital receipts for that hit Jonas Brothers album?
Being a student is our main occupation, and you wouldn't expect a person in the work world to have one phone number for both professional and personal use (Google Voice excluded).*
My university has taken advantage of the Google integration option successfully, allowing us students to have a more polished webmail experience. Our addresses are set up as <user>@clemson.edu and <user>@g.clemson.edu. Using the Google account, we can forward our emails to any other address and take advantage of Google Calendar and Google Apps. It's really a win-win-win. Win for the university in having less technical stuff to take care of. Win for the students in having access to some of the most innovative online applications. And win for Google in having the next generation of the work force adapted to the online cloud-style environment.
*Really, Google Voice follows the e-mail forwarding concept beautifully. While you want a central number at which to receive calls, you want the option to regulate who has what access to your time. The same goes for email. You might want to have all messages in one place, but it's important to distinguish between what's serious and what's just for fun.
i absolutely hate how my school's webmail is set up. the service is slow, clunky, and completely non-intuitive. so, i've been forwarding my .edu mail to my gmail account since day 1 of going to this school.