Ed-Tech list members,
The opinions listed below are my own. Since you have contact with our students, and provide them with guidance, I wanted to share this new e-mail solution with you so that you can share it with your students, if you wish.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:
UM has a new and improved e-mail service for students: UMail. I strongly urge you to let your students know about this and even to encourage them to switch to it, at least for all UM mail. Using UMail should greatly reduce the number of problems that students encounter receiving our messages on Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, and AOL. Send students to http://www.miami.edu/umail for the signup link, tutorials, answers to their questions, and more. (RSMAS and Med School students are not included - all other students are, I believe.)
EXTENDED DETAILS:
Many students at UM use an external e-mail service such as Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, or AOL. Some of them have trouble receiving e-mail from UM, either from Blackboard or other systems. In the past students could get an e-mail account on the UMSIS system. That is still available, but now the can get an account on the UM exchange system, the same system used by faculty in some schools and employees in all the business units on campus. It is the system that I use.
The student accounts will have 1 GB of storage space. They can have all the junk mail filtering and virus filtering that is on my account, and I can tell I don't see 2 junk mail messages a day, and only once in four years did an infected e-mail make it through. They can access their e-mail from the web. If they use Internet Explorer the web access will have an incredibly powerful interface, almost exactly like the Outlook application on a PC. Using Firefox will bring up an interface that is not quite as feature rich, but it can be used to access their accounts, as well. They will also be able to access their e-mail from devices such as the Blackberry Pearl, Blackjack, or many other cell phones with e-mail capabilities.
I hope you will share this information with your students. Any student having trouble receiving your e-mail should seriously consider switching to the UMail service. Others will probably find it a good solution, at least for all their UM e-mail.
TECHNICAL ISSUE:
The only "gotcha" that I can see is that when a student creates the UMail account their Preferred E-mail Address is automatically changed to their UMail account, and can only be changed to some other account if/when they delete the UMail account. So students cannot "try" the UMail account while continuing to have their e-mail sent to Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, AOL, or whatever system they use. When they get a UMail account, all mail sent to their @umiami.edu address will begin going to their UMail account. I see this as an advantage, since they don't even have to go to MyUM to make the change -- it is done automatically. But they should be aware that this is going to happen.
Bill Vilberg
Assoc. Dir. of Instructional Advancement
305-284-3944
