Beginning in the fall, students will receive significant changes to their UT e-mail accounts.
Students will be able to send up to 20 megabytes of attachments and will have an added 10 gigabytes of space in their inboxes.*
Vice President for Information and Technology Godfrey Ovwigho said the changes were spurred by student complaints about the lack of storage in the current setup.
“We listened to requests from students and decided upon making that change,” he said. “Students said that we should address this aggressively.”
Ovwigho said the increase in storage will make correspondence with faculty and staff as well as fellow students easier.
“Currently, the system does not allow them that much space and to put that much in an attachment. The limitations of the current e-mail space will be a thing of the past,” he said.
Paul Dye, a senior majoring in finance, said the extra space would not be necessary if students would check their mail regularly.
“There was enough space if you erase your e-mails that you don’t need,” he said. “People should actually read their e-mails and erase them regularly. That’s their own problem that students should take care of themselves.”
Tyler Crissinger, a graduate student majoring in pharmacy, said the current space was not efficient even if students did clean their inbox regularly.
“This extra space will be helpful because I remember I couldn’t get some e-mails because I didn’t think my inbox was full, even though it was. I thought I was cleaning it out regularly, but it still got full really quickly,” he said.
In addition to giving students more space in their inbox and the ability to attach larger documents, the domain of students’ e-mail will also change.
Incoming freshmen will not receive a “Firstname.Last name@UToledo.edu” alias. The addresses will now be “Firstname.Lastname@Rock et.UToledo.edu.”
Ovwigho said this addition was not due to student input, but he hopes students will embrace the idea of having the word “rocket” in their e-mail addresses.
“We felt strongly that students need to take pride in being Rockets,” Ovwigho said.
Though he said including “rocket” in the student e-mail domain is a way to induce student pride, some students disagreed.
“I don’t think it is a bad thing, but I don’t think an e-mail address shows school pride,” said Whitney Bennet, a graduate student majoring in pharmacy. “It’s more of an attitude that students should already have than a label.”
Others said they liked the idea of adding “rockets” in the name of pride.
“When people hear about UT, they don’t automatically think ‘Toledo Rockets,’ so putting that in the e-mail address is a good way of putting us out there,” Dye said.
Though incoming freshmen will immediately take on the “Rocket.UToledo.edu” domain, returning students can use their existing addresses as well as the new one if they wish, Ovwigho said.
Bennet said keeping the current e-mail address valid for a certain amount of time for returning students is a good way to ease them into the change rather than forcing them into using a new e-mail address immediately.
“The old e-mail will remain valid for returning students for about four or five more years,” Ovwigho said.
The additional space in student’s e-mail, ability to send larger attachments and the new “Rocket.UToledo.edu” alias will go into effect by the beginning of the fall semester, Ovwigho said.
* Correction: In the print edition of this article, we inaccurately reported that the changes to students' e-mail accounts will allow them 10 megabytes of storage space in their inboxes. Students will actually have access to 10 gigabytes of storage. The mistake has been corrected in the content above. The IC regrets this error.
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(can you say gray round file).