University Technology Services (UTS) announced this week that Oakland University Webmail will be outsourced to Google Gmail in an effort to improve the current failing system.

The change is set to take effect in early April, according to UTS Chief Information Officer Theresa Rowe.

Rowe said her department is excited to make the change and replace the system, which hasn’t been working correctly all semester.

“Our existing e-mail environment wasn’t performing to meet the needs of the university community,” Rowe said.

Graduate student Jan Dye can attest to this.

This semester, Dye is taking an online class in which the professor requires that all class work be submitted by e-mail using only an Oakland Webmail account.

“I wasn’t getting assignments in because my e-mail just stopped working for two weeks,” Dye said.

Luckily for Dye, her professor understood the problem and gave the class a break. 

The current Webmail system is causing students to wait for hours or even days to receive mail and just as long for sent e-mail to reach its destination. 

Dye said she is still getting e-mails from February. 

UTS said the reason the system is slow is because it has reached its storage capacity. The department blames the growing campus and escalating demand for e-mail in general.

The new Gmail system will give the university access to a lot more storage space. Rowe said the new service will offer students all sorts of features, including expanding the size of student’s inboxes from 100 megabytes with the current system to 6.5 gigabytes. 

The amount of spam e-mail was another reason for the sluggishness. The new system also will offer more extensive spam filtering. 

“We are doing all we can behind the scenes to make the transition easier for students,” said Rowe. 

Students will keep the e-mail addresses they have now and will have the choice of whether to transfer their saved messages over to the new system.

Rowe said that UTS will have a step-by-step process to guide students on how to transfer their messages over if they want.

But the most important feature of the new system for students is speed. 

Freshman Britnae Corley-Washington uses Webmail several times a day and says she’s frustrated with how slow it’s been. 

“All I want is everything we have now, just faster,” she said.

Aniela Henry, a junior communication major, wants easier access.

“People will use it more if you don’t have to click five things, and if it doesn’t take five minutes to load,” she said.

Transfer student Kristin Maksuta suggested that the university provide each student with an online address book to make it easier to find professors’ e-mail addresses.

Dye wants the administration to consider a few things before making the change.

“They need to think in terms of growth,” Dye said. “With a growing university, they need to make sure this system will still work in five years and we don’t have a problem like this again.”

She uses a mail client to receive her mail and manage all of her e-mail addresses and also hopes the new system will be compatible with mail clients. 

Sophomore Lawrence Maksuta has a simple hope.

“It will be good as long as it’s fast,” he said.