Latest revision as of 15:30, 11 February 2010

Should Purdue's email be provided by Gmail? What are the pros/cons of the switch?

• The obvious pros are huge storage space, chat messaging capability, and threaded conversations. The con, and this is a big one, is that private student information that is probably protected by Purdue's network right now, would be available to a third party corporation. Dlamba 03:04, 3 November 2009 (UTC)
  • Well, I'm not too keen on Itap employees reading my mail either :) After a little research, I found a few sites that document ways (using firefox plugins) to encrypt your gmail email contents. From a system administrator point of view, I would say the main downside is giving up reliability control. When gmail is down (it happens!), no one can access email. Also, there are peace-of-mind issues in giving your email to someone else. If a google warehouse full of servers explodes, can I get my emails back? Obviously the flip side is that Purdue has to address these concerns too, and it is much cheaper to have Google worry about the integrity and reliability of the data. --Masonz 13:58, 9 November 2009 (UTC)
    • These issues are completely no problem compared to Purdue (GMail is practically never down, but Purdue does routine maintenance shutting down the mail, and it would take much more than one warehouse to explode before they lost any data) --Dennis
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• I have heard Purdue could save more than $200,000 per year by using gmail. If that is true, then it would be nice to ensure that this money would go back to the students in some way or another. --Mboutin 10:51, 20 November 2009 (UTC)
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• No way man, Purdue with IMAP for the win. Use the email client of your choice (Like Thunderbird, et al.). Just think of what you want on your resume - Purdue, or gmail. --Dennis
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• Now if we switched to gmail could we keep the email address after we graduate? If so, then that would definitely be an added bonus to switching. --Matt
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