University switches to Gmail

    Google Mail (Gmail) may become, as it has for other Kentucky universities, the new e-mail provider for Murray State.
    Linda Miller, chief information officer of Information Systems said it is time to change from Murray State’s current obsolete e-mail service to a provider that meets the needs of students, faculty and staff.
    The current e-mail system is aging and antiquated, Miller said, and the current server has become overburdened with the number of e-mail accounts and the volume of e-mails.
    “Four thousand Murray State students have their e-mails forwarded to another e-mail account,” Miller said at a Faculty Senate meeting.   
    Students with a Murray State e-mail have 5 MB of storage, which, Miller said, is unrealistically small and largely restricting.
    She said with Gmail, accounts have a capacity of 7.3 GB, a 1,400-fold increase over the current 5 MB.
    She said another problem with the system is that it cannot back up saved information, and if the server fails, one cannot retrieve it.
    “If we have a disaster that takes down our server room, we lose whatever e-mail was on the server,” Miller said.
    Gmail maintains several backup servers in multiple locations, she said, and a disaster or hardware failure in one location would not impact the system.
    The cost to maintain a spam filtering service is increasing and taking more staff time to reduce the amount of spam, Miller said.
    Google charges nothing as part of its Educational Edition of Google Apps for all these benefits and solutions to the current systems issues, Miller said.
    Google will also prevent advertisements to those e-mail users, she said.
    Miller said they hope to develop their customer base so students will open a public Gmail account when they lose their school e-mails.
    The possibility exists that students can continue to use their school addresses after graduation and still have the Murray State’s Google service advantages, Miller said.
    Sarah Fuller, senior from Owensboro, Ky., said she has her school e-mails forwarded to her own Gmail account.
    “I regularly use Gmail, and a switch to their system would be much more convenient than Murray State’s current e-mail system,” she said.
    The migration from our current e-mail system to Google as our provider should go very smoothly, Miller said.
    Miller emphasized that students will not have to give out their passwords during the transition.
    Said Miller: “The age and condition of our e-mail system dictates that we move off of it as soon as possible; we must make a change, and the only option is what we change to.”
    Contact Thornton at casey.thornton@murraystate.edu.