Sean's Blog

At my alma mater, the e-mail system is still “owned and operated” by the university itself. Right before finals/final projects one semester, the e-mail system (aside from the Exchange system for faculty, ironically enough) died completely. From that point on, I had my school e-mail forwarded to my own domain and my own mail server, though failures were very rare from that point forward on the university system, as far as I ever heard. I’m not so sure that Google or Microsoft could really do much better, storage space aside*. Even the university’s web mail interface was pretty good, as it was powered by IMP. For me, it all goes back to having someone accountable in-house, which I think is preferable.

* - Yes, I know storage space is thought of as a big deal for e-mail, but if people would stop using it as storage space for 100 megabyte Word files and that awesome video of a cat flying on a ceiling fan, perhaps this wouldn’t be a big deal. There are better systems for that purpose, after all…