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Well, I also decided to write a letter to the Maneater because that's where the story originally was. I don't know if it will be published, but I think it has a decent shot. If you want to read it, here goes: If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. This old adage holds true when examining the University's plan to migrate all student e-mail accounts to Windows Live (âE-mail with 2 gigs under trialâ, April 28, 2006.) At first glance, it looks great: 2GB of space, you can choose to keep your â@mail.mizzou.eduâ e-mail address after you graduate, and Microsoft will be nice enough to host it for no cost at all to the university. But when you look a little closer at the service, it starts to look less and less attractive: 1. You won't be able use an e-mail client such as Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, or OS X Mail. E-mail clients such as these and others are far more powerful, faster, and user-friendly to compose and manage e-mail with than the current Webmail interface, which is roughly what you would get with the Windows Live mail. E-mail clients allow the user to automatically sort and flag messages based on sender, do real-time spell checking, and have many other features that Web-based e-mail doesn't provide. 2. You won't be able to use the address book functionality that is built into Exchange and Webmail. IATS director of Information Technology Randy Weimer stated that the MU faculty/staff/student address book and calendar functionality that is built into the current system would not be present in the Windows Live system. This feature allows the user to type in the name of the person that they want to send the e-mail to in the âTo:â box in Exchange instead of having to go look up their e-mail address. 3. The new system effectively mandates your choice of Web browser and operating system. The Windows Live e-mail interface will act somewhat similarly to the current Webmail interface in the fact that it displays a better and more feature-filled user interface only to users who use Microsoft Internet Explorer to check Webmail. People who choose to use other browsers like the very popular Mozilla Firefox or Apple Safari see a stripped-down version. And since IE only runs on Windows after Microsoft discontinued the production of IE for Mac, about a fifth of the student body that runs MacOS or Linux will be forced to use the degraded interface or switch to Windows. It is thus apparent that Microsoft âreadily admits that their goal is to hook students for life,â as Wiemer put it. Also, the e-mail accounts will foist pop-up ads on the user after they graduate. There had to be a catch somewhere. There is a little more to this issue than just about getting a sorely-needed increase in our e-mail accounts. It eliminates the student's ability to choose how they want to manage their e-mail. MSA and a few others are testing the system, and I urge them to say no to switching our e-mail to Windows Live. -Phillip Kelchen Junior, biological engineering |
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