Schools make shift to Gmail

It has become a common problem. A student logs into Webmail to find a screen reading "Inbox contains no messages," though there are thousands of emails in the account.

The technological hiccup — which is actually caused by storing too many messages in an inbox — is one of several reasons why some students have begun to abandon the University's Webmail system, opting instead to forward their emails to Yahoo! or Gmail accounts.

If recent trends are any indication, though, this practice may soon be a thing of the past. Google is attempting to make inroads into the education market by offering free, customized email systems to universities and colleges.

Google's offering, "Apps for Education," provides users with email, calendar and instant message services. The software package is built around Gmail, Google's free Web-based email system. Google is currently seeking schools to participate in a beta period to test out the program, which may one day reach Princeton.

"The University is aware there may be benefits to partnering with Google and other companies," University spokeswoman Cass Cliatt '96 said, adding that "we are still in the fact-finding stages."

A switch over to Gmail, in addition to providing two gigabytes of memory, would allow alumni to keep their princeton.edu accounts long after graduation.

USG vice president Rob Biederman '08, who was elected to be the next president on Tuesday, said the student government has yet to discuss the issue.

Though the Webmail memory quota was dramatically increased in March 2005, from 40MB to 200MB, problems with the system persist.

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Kaitlin Renaud '09, a residential computing consultant for OIT, said that the extra memory space may have actually caused more problems than existed before.

"There's no incentive to delete your mail that people have so many messages in their inbox that sometimes their Webmail doesn't load," Renaud said, adding that RCCs have dealt with the problem a lot recently.

"I haven't deleted a single message since I got the [Webmail] account," Maia McWilliams '10 said, "and I'm even on the dining services email list, which means I get about 30 messages a day. I have 3,000 unread messages."

Most students said that having their Webmail messages forwarded to Yahoo or Gmail was more efficient that maintaining multiple accounts.

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"It's convenient because I have to check Gmail anyway," Yoonju Kim '10 said.

Gmail is also besting Webmail by offering near limitless memory space, sorting email into conversations with easy to find threads and using interfaces that are more user-friendly.

For some students, the University Webmail is more of an academic email account.

"You want to make sure that Webmail is purely academic and not filled with junk mail," said Gabriel Rodriguez '10, who uses a Yahoo email account in addition to University Webmail. "Yahoo is more of a personal email."