Have you ever had problems with your ACU e-mail account?
Maybe there was a time when Sing Song consumed your life for two months and you just finished that research paper that was due six weeks ago. But when you pulled up to your trusty myACU account to e-mail the tardy term paper to your professor at 3:15 a.m., the system was inconveniently “down for construction.”
Or maybe you didn’t get that e-mail from your professor that the smelly guy next to you in Bible said that he had your midterm’s answers verbatim; and you got a “C” when you knew the “A” you deserved was stolen by your faulty e-mail account.
Well if these stories bring back stress you never want to encounter again, worry not. Come April the entire ACU e-mail system will convert to the Google based Gmail as a participant of the program Google Apps for Education.
The spring shift is ACU’s attempt to eliminate the e-mail problems that this inbox intensive university has had over the years; a shift that the Optimist believes this campus has needed for a while.
Too many times has the current Sun Java based system let the students and faculty of this campus down, and too many times have we seen the “e-mail system down for maintenance” message at the myACU homepage. ACU needs this change.
ACU will be one of the first colleges or universities in the nation to partner with the search engine giant and use Gmail as its e-mail system since it was first offered in the university context in the fall of 2006.
The two main advantages Gmail has to offer are its solid spam filtering function and astounding two-gigabyte storage capacity.
These two features, in addition to a long list of other convenient services and capabilities, would keep the trash out of your inbox and make it easier to organize important e-mails that you don’t want to lose.
If two gigabytes means nothing to you, in “iPod” terms it is one-half of an iPod Nano, one-sixteenth of an iPod or up to 500 songs or five hours of video. That should be more than enough space for anything from assignments, to syllabi and even the funny cat pictures grandma sends.
And don’t worry you won’t have to send all your friends and grandma a new e-mail address; students and faculty will still be able to keep their old e-mail addresses. They will just be run by the more efficient Gmail system.
Overall the move to make Gmail the ACU community’s e-mail is one in the right direction. Gmail is a web luxury that will be welcomed with open arms come April. The switch may be the answer to ACU’s problems, at least when it comes to e-mail.
