I blabbed on (probably for far longer than you wanted to read) about the birth and decline of Penn’s undergraduate e-mail. But now for some good news: the death.

To quickly recap, Penn’s e-mail has been plagued with problems recently. History professor Drew Faust told the DP:

“Yesterday [SAS e-mail] was extremely slow. You would type a character and it would take about five seconds to come up on the screen.”

Whoops, she said that in 1994. Well, it sounds like last semester, except these days, users can’t even log on. At the same time, free services have quickly gained users and rapidly improved features. Google’s Gmail service offers more than two gigabytes of storage space and an integrated online chat system. The new version of Microsoft Hotmail has a reading pane, allowing you to scroll through and read messages without opening any new web pages. SAS Webmail has a clunky interface that does not integrate searching or viewing into a single page and offers only 60 MB of storage (Engineers have a more reasonable 250).

But finally, nearly a year ago, Penn officials promised the ultimate solution. It’s bold, innovative and long ovedue: Abandon Penn’s e-mail system and outsource the service to a third party.

Unfortunately, bad news was of course soon to follow. Officials have continually set deadlines to decide on a provider, and just as continually failed to meet their own deadlines. IT officials recently announced they had put off choosing between Microsoft and Gmail again.

Ugh. How long does it take to decide between better and much better? (respectively, of course)

So this week, I gave up the wait. I went ahead and began forwarding my upenn.edu e-mail to Gmail, just as many, many other students, staff and faculty have done. One such switcher, College senior Ruth Stein, gave up on SAS e-mail after repeated crashes during finals last semester.

“I just couldn’t communicate with my professors,” she said. Ironically, “Gmail didn’t solve that, because they still couldn’t receive my emails.”

The advantages of ditching Penn e-mail are endless. Goodbye “inbox is full” messages, hello “labels.” Most important, I don’t feel like I’m back in the late 1990s when I use Gmail.

“The bigger inbox is definitely an advantage because I don’t have to worry about deleting. The search engine is obviously better because it’s Google,” Stein added.

When students are giving up on the school’s own e-mail iN large numbers (and I promise, it’s large numbers–my Gchat buddy list is exploding with Penn kids), it’s time to act. Anything’s better than the crash-prone SAS/SEAS Mail. And either system would be a major upgrade for Whartonites and Nursing students.

It’s for this school to come to a decision. Outsourcing e-mail was a bold move, but not without follow-through. And they better hurry up, before everyone starts forwarding and there are no users left to complain. We won’t hold out forever.

P.S. While you’re at it Penn, could you get rid of the damn “u”?

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 8th, 2007 at 4:41 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.