After 10 years of working to set up free lifetime e-mail accounts for alumni, Ball State University Computing Services will launch iConnect this month. Until then, alumni will continue finding their own free lifetime e-mail accounts at Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail and other readily available services.
While the school seems to be extending a kind, electronic hand to alumni by offering these accounts, the new e-mail addresses are no more convenient than other free services.
Alumni will have to switch from their current Ball State addresses, username@bsu.edu, to the alumni addresses, username@ballstate.bsu.edu, and they will be required to set up the accounts on their own. This means the new e-mail addresses are longer and more complex than other free e-mail addresses, and they require just as much effort to sign up for. Beyond that, they are not directly linked to the alumni's previous Ball State accounts, so friends, family and colleagues will have to change their address books anyway, or their messages won't be delivered.
The university, however, is getting benefits from the program. Not only is Microsoft Corp. offering the service to the university free of charge for being an early adopter, but now the university has a permanent and convenient contact method for sending announcements, updates and funding requests to all alumni.
If Ball State truly wanted to benefit its alumni with permanent e-mail addresses, it would consider the needs of the alumni and not just the ease with which the university can implement the program. Alumni have been requesting to keep their Ball State e-mail accounts so everyone - not just the university - can continue to find them easily, but iConnect does not help them do that.
The effort will be appreciated, and the university is working in the right direction, but the service provided by iConnect is not what alumni were asking for.
Since UCS isn't going to offer continued use of the same account alumni had when they were students, it has promised to be more courteous in deleting those accounts. UCS has said that, with iConnect, the notification of deletion will give alumni two weeks to save or delete items from their Ball State e-mail and Web space, as well as allow them the chance to sign up for alumni addresses.
Sticking to that promise is the best e-mail offer the university has extended to its alumni so far.
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