The era of T-mail may be short lived. The UT Office of Information Technology has talked with Google and Microsoft for the past six months to look at the possibility of outsourcing student e-mail, said Jesse Poore, UT vice president of information technology.
The initial outsourcing of e-mail would target undergraduate students, he said.
“I appointed an ad hoc committee to explore the possibilities, and the conclusion was to outsource student e-mail,” Poore said. “The primary reason is to get the large storage quota. We cannot compete with large-file storage for free.”
Currently, T-mail offers undergraduate students 102.4 megabytes of storage space, according to the OIT’s official Web site. Faculty, staff and graduate students are allocated 256 megabytes of storage space. A service like Google could provide at least 70 times the space currently allocated to undergraduate students.
The storage size of T-mail forces students, faculty and staff to delete e-mail periodically. With a larger storage quota, needs to do so would be lessened.
Additionally, with outsourced mail, students would maintain their accounts and the UTK.edu e-mail address even after graduation, said Marianne Breinig, head of the Faculty Senate Information Technology Committee.
“UTK.edu is kind of an identity for students,” said Jamie Lonie, student member of the committee which considered outsourcing e-mail. “We definitely need to keep UTK.edu. Some universities have kept it or changed it slightly.”
If the university were to keep the domain name associated with student e-mails, however, Breinig said the move might not save a significant amount of money, citing a study by a committee from UT-Martin.
Lonie said outsourcing would also provide 24-hour technical support, in addition to the support still provided by the university’s OIT.
“If students had an issue not on a business day, students could call Google for technical support,” he said.
There were three main options for the committee, he said. Keeping e-mail the way it is, outsourcing it completely by letting students give the university any e-mail address they wished to serve as their official university e-mail or a mix of the two. The committee ultimately decided the third option — outsourcing e-mail while still providing the UTK.edu e-mail address — was the best.
“While I think our university has done a good job with e-mail, there’s no way we could keep up with the innovations of Google and Microsoft,” he said. “Switching would be a good thing because we could keep up with different trends.”
Lonie and Breinig said a switch to outsourcing e-mail would take place much quicker than the UT migration from Webmail to T-mail did.
Poore said outsourcing e-mail became a trend among universities about two years ago.
“Most students arrive with e-mail accounts, social networking, et cetera,” Poore said. “University-provided e-mail is no longer a big benefit to incoming students. Google and Microsoft appear willing to spend big money to capture the loyalty of students.”
Other universities within the UT system are moving towards Google.
“I asked all campuses to take a look at the outset,” Poore said. “UT-Martin completed their review by end of summer with a clear request to move student e-mail to Google. UT-Chattanooga agreed with UT-Martin. UT-Knoxville appears to agree with UT-Martin but wants to see the details.”
Meanwhile, opinion on Google and Microsoft is split at UT-Knoxville, though more students in the deliberation side with Google.
When judging the two e-mail providers, Lonie preferred Google because it was simple, provided more space, online editing of spreadsheets and documents and more mobile devices.
As of press time, no final decision has been reached about outsourcing e-mail or which provider to use.