A new email service for Bristol students - have your say
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- much larger mailboxes - eg 7GB or more
- a friendlier and more modern webmail to replace Squirrelmail
- you could keep the same email address after graduation, useful when applying for jobs
The email address would include your name (which you could choose), your year of entry, and 'bristoluniversity', though it wouldn't be @bristol.ac.uk. For example Edward Smith who started in 2009 might be Ted.Smith.2009 <at> bristoluniversity.org.uk We haven't decided on the domain after the @ yet, there are a few possibilities.
Separately you'd be able to choose at which address you want to receive official emails from the university. It could be at this new address or any other address you already have. Whichever is convenient to you, as it is important that you read these regularly.
There are two big firms offering this service to universities - Google and Microsoft. Both offer it free of charge, as they are keen to get students using their products. Quite a few unis already do student email this way, including UWE, Warwick and UCL. Emails aren't stored onsite at the university, they are stored in a data centre run by the supplier. On the web you sign in through the portal, but then webmail functions like Google Mail or Outlook Web Access. You can also access email on your mobile phone.
We've got lots more info and FAQs (available to logged-on Bristol students & staff only).
We are at quite an early stage in this and we'd like to know what you think. Do you like the idea? Do you have any problems with it? What would you like to see in the service and how should it work?
Now is a great time to get in touch, so the plans can change according to feedback. You can comments on this blog, on the wiki, or email Nick.Skelton <at> bristol.ac.uk. Thoughts are welcome from anyone with an interest - current students, prospective students, alumni.
Thanks for your help!
21 Responses to “A new email service for Bristol students - have your say”
Karen Wood wrote:
June 16th, 2010 at 7:31 pm
I like the idea, but having the year of entry seems unnecessary and unprofessional. Is there a certain reason why it’s to be included?
Dimitris wrote:
June 16th, 2010 at 7:31 pm
I believe this would be great since some of my job applications refer to this address. I have no complaints from squirrelmail but it tends to be sometimes a bit slow. I would prefer Google as a service because of the open-source nature of the company
James Womack wrote:
June 16th, 2010 at 7:48 pm
I am not sure about this proposal. The university e-mail system seems to work very well as it is. In reality, most students will have a separate e-mail address already with a large cloud service like Hotmail, Gmail or Yahoo! Mail.
When I send an e-mail using my university e-mail address I am confident that it is going through the university’s own servers and that any data/information contained within it would be cared for by the university. I am also confident that if any issues occur with the service, there will be knowledgeable personnel capable and enthusiastic to address the problem. With a cloud based service I would not be so confident.
I think the university should maintain it’s own e-mail service. This would mean having full control over the operation of the e-mail service and also full access to the data being sent using it. I trust the university more than I trust Microsoft and Google. An additional worry would be that, if data centres are not based in the UK for cloud services, these data centres would presumably not be obliged to adhere to British data-privacy laws.
Offering an ‘address for life’ is a good idea in my view, though I think it would not necessarily have to mean the end of the university’s own e-mail service. Perhaps it would be easier to set up a forwarding service, so students can have e-mails directed at an @bristol.ac.uk address forwarded to their own private e-mail address after graduation?
Sarah Haswell wrote:
June 16th, 2010 at 8:12 pm
I’d love to see SquirrelMail replaced, the main problem I have with it is the slowness. Also it seems odd that when you access mail from MyBristol you get the green inbox layout and when you open a message it switches to the blue. I’m not sure what this signifies but I know they’re different things 
I normally read my mail through Mozilla Thunderbird so I can see my university and Gmail together and select things easily.
Something much slicker and more intuitive would be excellent. Personally I use Gmail as it’s really really convenient (e.g. for filtering mail, combining multiple accounts through POP/IMAP) and they’re not trying to suck you into Windows Live.
Another thought is, I’d like to be able to channel my university e-mail into Gmail. I can’t remember whether it’s POP or IMAP that it wanted but there was definitely a reason I couldn’t!
Robert Pamely wrote:
June 16th, 2010 at 8:20 pm
I think there are numerous reasons for not using Microsoft Hotmail. It is slow, clumsy, ugly and incompatible with its lack of IMAP and general lack of integration outside the Microsoft ecosystem. The lack of IMAP is the most important thing for me, I currently link the university system up to my mail client, as do many others, and other people have it linked to their phones. It would be disastrous to lose this. Not to mention, Gmail is by far the best online webmail client available. However, I don’t think I would opt into the service as one of the only times I use my university email to send mail is to have the official bristol.ac.uk domain in my address, and I don’t use Squirrelmail so this isn’t a huge problem to me (though I have pity for those that do).
Sam Howard wrote:
June 16th, 2010 at 8:21 pm
Microsoft exchange would be great for the outlook web access, calender and contacts features. I currently have a hosted exchange email account and the features are invaluable for organisation and ease of use. The global address list would be very handy aswell as using the calender for lectures and sending outlook calender invites etc. It would be very handy for iphone users also via activesync push email. I cant say enough how useful this would be.
Julieta wrote:
June 16th, 2010 at 9:30 pm
Brilliant idea. I actually have a gmail account provided by my former university and it works pretty well. The domain is @miuandes.cl, so @mybristol.org.uk or smth of that sort might be good as well.
It would be even better if the official uni email could eventually be diverted to that new account, because it’d allow us to keep old emails.
Chris Stern wrote:
June 17th, 2010 at 10:25 am
For the love of all that is pure and good, go with Google.
Windows Live Mail is an abomination, as has any email service Microsoft has ever churned out.
Nick (ResNet manager) wrote:
June 17th, 2010 at 10:56 am
Thanks for all the comments so far. Picking up on a few specific points:
@Karen Wood: I’m interested in why you think having year of entry in mailname is unprofessional. Could you expand on that?
The main reason to include year of entry is so that more students get first choice of their email name. There’s likely to be several students called Alex Jones within the uni, and many more amongst alumni. But there’s typically just one per year group.
Nick (ResNet manager) wrote:
June 17th, 2010 at 11:05 am
@James Womack: thanks for your kind words about the current email service – I’ll pass those on to the sysadmins.
Privacy issues – the data centres would be based either in the EU or the US. We’d prefer the EU for the reasons you describe, and this is the sort of thing we could negotiate in the contract. Even if the data centres were in the US, Google and MS are signed up to The US-EU Safe Harbour Agreement, which means they commit to EU standards on data privacy. Ultimately however this does boil down to trust as you point out.
Nick (ResNet manager) wrote:
June 17th, 2010 at 11:07 am
@Sarah Haswell: You can channel your Bristol email into GMail now if you want – see https://wwws.cse.bris.ac.uk/cgi-bin/redirect-mailname-external
Nick (ResNet manager) wrote:
June 17th, 2010 at 11:11 am
@Robert Pamely: Are there times you need bristol.ac.uk in your address, and something like bristoluniversity.org.uk wouldn’t do? If so would be useful to know what those are.
Nick (ResNet manager) wrote:
June 17th, 2010 at 11:14 am
lots of comments on Google vs Microsoft and IMAP access:
Both suppliers offer IMAP access and I’d definitely want to keep that.
If we went with MS we’d get Exchange, not Hotmail/LiveMail. Exchange is Microsoft’s corporate email tool, and it’s a lot better than Hotmail.
Chandrachoodan wrote:
June 17th, 2010 at 11:39 am
All for the idea. Gmail serves better in this instance.
Chris (Helpdesk Advisor) wrote:
June 17th, 2010 at 12:43 pm
@Julieta: To keep copies of old messages (for example, when you leave the university) you can add another email account in mulberry and then drag and drop messages between the two. This maintains all of the email data such as Sent date and From fields. Please contact the helpdesk for more information.
@Nick(ResNet manager): One of the things that students need a .ac.uk domain for is the “ultimate steal” which gives them office for 91% of the RRP. There are also other websites that require .ac.uk addresses to prove that they are students (For example, MSDNAA).
Nick (ResNet manager) wrote:
June 17th, 2010 at 2:26 pm
@Chris Thanks. I knew about Ultimate Steal but not MSDNAA.
Anybody know of others? If so would be great if you can mention them here.
Robert Blenkinsopp wrote:
June 18th, 2010 at 4:09 pm
This is an issue which I have completely reversed my original view on.
I definitely like the idea of an email for life, transient email addresses are highly irritating and a permanent one allows a level of professionalism as has already been said.
Both Microsoft and Gmail services are very good, personally I have moved all my personal email from my own domain onto the Google Apps service which provided all the Gmail services for you own domain.
So far I have been very impressed with the service, supporting Push email solid web-mail and good background services.
Microsoft Exchange is also very good an I know a number of people that use it, however I am skewed on this matter somewhat as I have and use an Android phone which integrates out the box with all Google services, even those on your own domain.
Some concerns I have are over browser support for webmail, Gmail appears to be very good in all browsers I have used (Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome and Internet explorer) Where as up until recently, the Outlook (Exchange) web mail displays incorrectly in firefox, one of the most common browsers.
Regarding the current system, the underlying service (IMAP, which actually includes push in the form of the IMAP IDLE command) is very good however the web-mail is really quick aged and simplistic compared to other offerings.
There is definitely a privacy argument for
the University maintaining control of it’s own email servers, and there are much better mail packages than SquirrelMail (SmarterMail to name one good example).
Originally my opinion was to stick with a university controlled system but I am leaning towards a Google hosted solution, simply for the speed scalability and feature set.
~Rob
Zak wrote:
June 20th, 2010 at 3:54 pm
I’m all for it in terms of cost-saving and the neater interface.
For alumni e-mail, I’ve seen no mention of a subdomain (alumni.bristol.ac.uk) as a possibility — why not? From my University of Manchester degree I’m simply username@alumni.manchester.ac.uk, which looks professional and is clearly associated with the university.
On the Google/Microsoft choice: Google’s contributions back to open source software eclipse Microsoft’s. They’ve contributed almost all of Android & Chrome (Chromium), Google Web Toolkit, the Chromium OS (soon) and many more low-profile ones; they’ve sponsored the Google Summer of Code and been the main sponsor behind Firefox development many years running, hired many OSS experts to give them regular paycheques to continue their non-Google work, hosted many OSS conferences the Google Campus; they’ve also given away (but not opened) things like Google Earth and Google SketchUp and a slew of cloud services.
Perhaps most importantly, they’ve constantly respected and contributed to open standards and interoperability. I’ve been a sysadmin for an Exchange (Server)-based organisation and I’m currently a sysadmin for a Google Mail-based organisation; while I’m sure there are differences when Exchange is in the cloud, Google is transparent and standards-compliant all the way, and it makes a huge difference.
No company does this out of charity; they have shareholders to answer to and many of these charitable donations benefit their ad targeting in some way. Still, if it comes down to a choice beween the two and if arguments on a “good for society” basis count for anything, I’d personally much rather have the ad (and other) revenue go to a company that habitually gives a percentage back.
Regarding the (SLFAQ) “What if they start charging?” — it’s not a contract unless there’s “consideration” (usually money/services) both sides, so what is it (on paper) UoB would be giving them?
Nick (ResNet manager) wrote:
June 21st, 2010 at 11:41 am
@Zak: a subdomain is a possibility. The plan is that students would get an email address on arrival at the university, which they’d keep when the graduate. Hence it would be confusing if we used ‘alumni.bris.ac.uk’ as current students aren’t alumni. To use a subdomain we’d need a handy word that means “the community of students and alumni”. We couldn’t think of one – but any suggestions?
On the contract: what is it UoB would give them? Effectively the university is lending it’s name to the service, and that’s a valuable consideration. We would be giving Google or MS customers. While these customers don’t pay anything now the might be more inclined to buy products from the same supplier in future, and buy into their whole ecosystem.
Money doesn’t have to change hands. We did a similar deal a few years ago with the Freewire IPTV service.
Alex Sheppard wrote:
June 21st, 2010 at 1:31 pm
I’ve used Microsoft Sharepoint at school during 6th form, and it was pretty awesome: there is so much to customise, yet includes most of the windows GUI that many users are familiar with. The Outlook Web access is pretty good too.
Gmail is a great email client too.
So if you just wanted mail, I think either would do, but if you were thinking of incorporating other things, then perhaps Sharepoint.
Kurt Johnson wrote:
June 16th, 2010 at 7:29 pm
Go with Google!!!! Gmail is far better