Google Inc. offered the University the chance this summer to be the first campus to use its Gmail client for University e-mail accounts, but the University turned it down.
San Jose City College University took the opportunity, becoming the first college to use Gmail through a new Google program testing Gmail service for Web domains, Google announced Friday.
Computing Center Director Joe St. Sauver decided against Google’s offer to use Gmail as the University’s e-mail client because it is forbidden by University policy, he wrote in an e-mail interview.
Google also offered the University a test version of its client that may have posed technical difficulties, he wrote.
University policy instituted this fall requires that students use their official uoregon.edu accounts to receive billing statements and class-related e-mail.
“Unless otherwise prohibited by law, the University may send official communications to employees and students by e-mail to an account assigned by the University with the full expectation that such e-mails will be read by the recipient in a timely fashion,” according to the policy on the Office of the Registrar’s Web site.
It also states that students and employees “should use UO e-mail accounts for all University-related e-mail communications.”
Institution-wide deployment of Gmail accounts would “be contrary to institution-wide e-mail policy,” St. Sauver wrote.
The University previously allowed students to specify their preferred e-mail account. It still allows users to forward e-mail to other accounts, but “forwarding is NOT recommended” because “there is a risk of having such e-mails lost or blocked in the process of forwarding,” according to the policy.
The uoregon.edu accounts, which now allow students to store 500 MB of information, are both available online and compatible with popular e-mail programs such as Microsoft Outlook.
By Sept. 15, the University began offering AlphaMail, a new Web-based interface for uoregon.edu e-mail addresses developed by Tony Kay, streaming media specialist for the Computing Center. Although it’s still under development, AlphaMail sports a design similar to Gmail and allows users to search their e-mails online.
Unveiled in spring 2004, Google’s Gmail is “an experiment in a new kind of webmail, built on the idea that you should never have to delete mail and you should always be able to find the message you want,” according to Google’s Web site. It allows users to store more than 2.5 gigabytes and search their messages and displays related e-mails as a “conversation.”
Initially available only through invites from other Gmail users, Gmail is currently offered to anyone who has an education e-mail address ending in “.edu,” who has a mobile phone or who receives an invitation.
“Massive storage and features that tame the most unruly inboxes, like powerful mail search, conversation view for messages, and a fast interface, make Gmail very handy for students,” Gmail Product Manager Stephanie Hannon wrote Friday on Google’s blog.
St. Suaver also emphasized that Gmail is still in test phases.
“Beta programs are ‘test’ or ‘pre-production’ experiments, and the decision to participate in such an experimental program (particularly for a productions service such as e-mail) entails accepting the risk that such an experiment may fail or experience serious problems,” he wrote in an e-mail.
He also said the University’s non-participation in the Gmail beta program “is in no way a gating function for any individual student who’d like to obtain a Gmail account.”
“Gmail accounts are extremely easy to obtain, and in my experience, students who want a Gmail count have no trouble obtaining one,” St. Sauver said.
Not everyone agrees with St. Sauver’s decision.
Junior Michael McNeeley, who first proposed to Google that it partner with the University, told the Emerald that Gmail has advantages compared with AlphaMail, including the ability to translate messages into other languages. Gmail currently supports 29 languages. He also criticized AlphaMail’s search capabilities.
“AlphaMail will provide some sort of e-mail search substitute, but it will not live up to the quality of Gmail search,” he wrote in an essay he submitted to Google to help it lobby the University.
The offer from Google came after McNeeley realized that the University’s new Web-based e-mail client, AlphaMail, “has the looks and feel of a low quality Gmail.” He also noticed that AlphaMail did not have some of the features that Gmail had, such as the ability to search through old e-mail.
He pointed out that the University already uses Google’s technology to allow users to search its Web site.
AlphaMail is an alternate interface to the traditional gladstone account offered by the University.
McNeeley e-mailed Google, proposing it partner with the University to offer Gmail accounts to students.
Easy access to previous e-mails was one of the things that McNeeley said would be an advantage Gmail could provide.
“Gmail would allow professors to track conversations with individual students by keeping everything in
context, easing headaches, and allowing them to spend time on more important tasks,” McNeeley wrote in the letter.
Hannon replied in an e-mail that the company was “considering building this type of product and would be happy to have University of Oregon as an early beta user.”
McNeeley contacted St. Sauver and told him about the idea, and St. Sauver contacted Hannon during the summer.
St. Sauver said in an e-mail that he would be happy to speak with Google representatives about the idea, but added that he may be “politically unreliable from Google’s point of view.” He also included links to articles he had authored concerning Google’s Gmail client.
One of the articles, published on www.campus-technology.com, discusses both the strengths and weaknesses of Gmail.
Discussing the implications of Gmail for higher education institutions, St. Sauver wrote that the 50 to 100 MB of storage space typical to colleges or universities “may feel like a Dixie cup of water at high noon in the middle of the Sonoran desert in August” if people use them to store all of their old e-mails.
“Google, on the other hand, will give you virtually all you’d want to drink, with plenty left over for a shower, for watering some needy cactus, and for making mud pies, too,” he wrote in the July 15, 2004 article.
Notwithstanding, he predicted others will “try to keep up with Google,” although competing would require much greater and potentially more costly use of universities’ networks.
He also stated that if institutions don’t compete, their users will switch to “one of the new huge Google accounts.”
“You sure better hope that they remember to check their old, sad, sorry, puny institutional account, since that’s probably where the university is going to be mailing important Official Notices That They Should Read,” he said
He wrote that Gmail’s anti-spam blocking might pose a problem for universities.
“It will be a miracle if you don’t end up having your schools’ e-mail blocked,” he wrote.
He also noted that Google shows advertising “automatically targeted based on the content of your mail messages” in Gmail and that ” some folks worry about Google being able tie (sic) to their Web searching and browsing habits via the cookies it uses.”
The “bottom line … Gmail is here and here to stay,” he wrote.
“You probably are going to want to start thinking about how you and your institution will cope with it, if you haven’t already done so,” he wrote.
Students who have other mail clients are able to forward their University mail to that client. There are instructions and help on forwarding e-mail on the University’s Webmail at cc.uoregon.edu/mailforward.html.

Contact the business, science and technology reporter at bsaxton@d
ailyemerald.com
Editor in Chief Parker Howell contributed to this report.