Bits & Bytes

The Gmail vs. Hotmail debate

Published in The Aggie on May 02, 2007

UC Davis' e-mail service hosts about 64,500 e-mail accounts, with just under half of those being active student accounts. Currently a mere 3,100 users redirect their mail to non-UC Davis domains, most popularly gmail.com, yahoo.com and hotmail.com.

Small as it may be, the number of students redirecting their mail is constantly growing, and the number of students directly subscribing with these companies for e-mail accounts is increasing.

As of now, the campus e-mail service offers a 40-megabyte quota, web, POP, and IMAP access, but Geckomail will soon have difficulty meeting the expectations of a growing campus population with ever-increasing technological needs.

Thanks to sheer size, providers like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft can offer faster downloads, higher storage volumes and more comprehensive virus protection and spam filtering than the campus e-mail system - it would be an expensive stretch of limited resources and staff for UC Davis to design a comparable system.

Instead, officials at UC Davis, like many other universities, have begun exploring options to contract out university e-mail with specific goals in mind, including enriching collaborative tools for student messaging needs, providing linkage to other communication services and reducing costs.

The benefits of two e-mail providers are being compared in great detail: Microsoft's Hotmail and Google's Gmail. Both have sophisticated e-mail systems and spend considerable time and effort keeping those systems up to date. Working with one or the other would allow the university to redirect resources to improve other critical information technology programs while simultaneously providing excellent e-mail services for students.

A survey of random students in March found that students were most concerned about keeping their "@ucdavis.edu" e-mail tag with lifetime accessibility, and other concerns included storage and virus and spam filtering - two aspects that would be improved using either Hotmail or Gmail.

At a student information session held Apr. 3, Hotmail representative Walter Harp emphasized the longstanding success and size of Microsoft with its cutting-edge "creativity and innovation."

Jeff Keltner, a Google Apps For Education representative, highlighted his company's focus on "user-centric computing" and its constant search for "the next killer application."

Babette Schmitt, director of UC Davis strategic planning and communications, said the campus is considering a pilot project with Google starting fall quarter, although the IET department will continue to consult with the campus community before a final decision is made in the coming weeks.

To express your opinion about campus e-mail services, visit vpiet.ucdavis.edu/student.email.cfm.

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