Last semester, students received an e-mail saying the campus was switching their student e-mail from Webmail to either Imail or Umail. This change was enforced throughout all IU campuses.

The change, which occurred in November, is part of IU Bloomington’s plan to give students better e-mail and more choices.

Charles Rondot, manager of University Communications in the Technology Services Department at IU Bloomington, said the change was a very good thing.

“The new Imail or Umail allows students more storage in their e-mail, as well as the ability to use their student e-mail after graduation,” Rondot said.

Nick Ray, director of Information Technology at IU Southeast, said he agreed.

The old Webmail only had 100 megabytes, with no additional features.  Imail, powered by Microsoft, has 10 gigabytes of storage, plus the ability to use Windows Live Messenger.

Umail, powered by Google, has seven gigabytes of storage, with additional features such as access to Google Talk for instant messaging. Umail also has the ability to use Google Doc’s for creating and sharing word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation documents.”

Both Ray and Rondot said Bloomington decided to use two accounts instead of one to give students more choices. Knowing some prefer Gmail to Hotmail, and vice versa, the decision was made to use both.

Jennifer Johnson Wolf, director of University Communications and special assistant to the chancellor, said she likes it that the change is giving students more options.

“That was a great decision,” Wolf said. “It lets students use which service is more comfortable to them.”

Rondot said another reason IU Bloomington made the decision to switch accounts was that the cost to update or replace the less functional hardware on Webmail didn’t make sense to spend, given both the popularity and enhanced features of the other e-mail systems.

It is only students, however, who have to switch their accounts. IU employees’ e-mail will stay the same. Wolf said the staff and faculty e-mail is different from student e-mail.

“Faculty did not have to change their e-mail because they operate under exchange accounts, which is a different system than students have,” Wolf said.

Ray said students who have not yet changed over will be manually migrated over to Umail by the tech department at Bloomington.

“The account will be moved to Umail because that system allows old e-mails and contacts to be moved over,” Ray said. “Imail does not.”

Once students have switched, any e-mail sent to their old account will be forwarded to their new one.