By Michael Napolitano
About one quarter of Northeastern students have said they are unsatisfied with Northeastern’s myNEU e-mail program, according to a recent community satisfaction survey on the site. The survey, which collected people’s opinions on a variety of myNEU features, sheds light on an increasingly popular trend among the student body: The forwarding of school e-mail to other e-mail services like Gmail or Windows Live Hotmail.
Bob Weir, vice president for Information Services, said just 63 percent of undergraduate students at Northeastern consider their primary e-mail account to be myNEU. Graduate students who use the school’s program are even scarcer, with 36 percent using it as their main program. This means that more than a quarter of all Northeastern students forward their email to another service.
“It’s not a practical system,” said Anjali Ramchandani, a sophomore English major. “Sometimes I can’t even see my sent mail, which is a pain.”
With these facts in mind, Weir said the school has been looking into improving the e-mail service for the past few years.
“Every six months we’ve been running a study to see if this is something that is possible,” Weir said.
Google and Microsoft both offer university integration services that allow users to keep their school account names and passwords with the added benefits of a professional interface.
Navid Atoofi, director of Systems and Productions Services (SPS), has been in charge of running each study, and said he will be conducting another soon.
There have been many reasons the school has not decided to switch e-mail service providers yet, Weir said. The quality of spam filtering was one aspect the university ultimately was not fully confident in, he said. The ability to transfer previous e-mails from the myNEU service to another is also something that had not been possible until recently, Weir said.
“There are four aspects we want to be sure of before we make a switch,” Weir said. “The migration process, integration, security and the overall quality of the service are all concerns that they wanted to be confident in. Ultimately, it’s all about direct control versus indirect control.”
Weir said he wanted to make sure customer service wouldn’t become a hassle for students and the school itself with the switch to a third-party provider.
These challenges aside, Weir said there are obvious advantages to working with another e-mail provider.
“Most students view Gmail or Hotmail as the gold standard, so we wouldn’t have to worry about keeping up with a quality gap,” he said. “With the resources of major companies devoted to e-mail, we will also be able to enjoy improvements that would not be possible with the limited budget we have.”
Constance Thomas, a middler English and cinema studies dual major, said she agreed that a change would probably be for the better.
“MyNEU is pretty primitive,” she said. “If the school could change it to something more efficient, then I think they should.”
If the change is approved, Weir said he hopes to be able to run a test program by the end of this summer and into the fall semester.
“We’ve talked with the Student Government Association and Resident Student Association about this for a while,” he said.
