STUDENTS PAY FEES AND DESERVE A FUNCTIONAL E-MAIL SYSTEM

Published Mar. 15, 2007 in "The Oklahoma Daily"
Viewable Online Here

NOTE: Follow-up to this column is above

Think back to your senior year of high school. Bad memories for some of you. Sorry. Specifically, think about the time that you enrolled at OU for the first time.

There was the obligatory adviser meeting, the gallery-worthy Sooner OneCard picture, and your new yourname-1@ou.edu e-mail address. This was likely followed by confusion, since your inbox was probably already home to several university-wide listserv messages. From then on, if you’re like most people on campus, you signed in to OU’s e-mail server in some form at least once day.

You’re more or less forced to. Most professors require, or at least prefer, communicating through OU mail. All university-related correspondence is delivered to your OU e-mail address. This means messages from the bursar’s office, academic services, the athletic ticket office and virtually every other campus office. Even if your mail is forwarded to another account at Yahoo or Gmail, for example, your mail still goes through the OU server.

Generally, that’s not a bad thing. OU mail is usually stable, reliable and quick. It’s simple to use, and gets your mail where it needs to be.

That’s only when it’s working properly.

Periodically, OU mail is reduced to the default “page cannot be found” screen. When this happens, it’s usually out of commission for the better part of a day. A highly nonscientific record seems to indicate that my OU mail has been down much more often lately than say last semester or last school year.

This can have significant consequences for students, particularly those dealing with graduate or medical school admission requirements this time of year. Given the busy life of a graduating senior, and most any student, often one block of time is set aside to answer e-mails and to send out materials before a looming deadline.

If OU mail just happens to be down during that time, you can sense what trouble that might bring to the student.
Even when it is working properly, OU mail has some irritating functionality issues.

Mail “sent” through OU mail sometimes doesn’t get delivered. At times, clicking on the “send” button in the message window produces no response. I have had firsthand knowledge of this on many occasions. The best fix is to save the message as a draft, and try to send it out again later. This isn’t a bad plan for casual e-mail contact, but can be a nightmare for time-sensitive communication.

Then there is the junk-mail filter, which doesn’t work that well.

I have mine turned on, like most students on campus. However, I still get hocked cheap Rolex watches, insider stock tips and Canadian male enhancement drugs via e-mail on an almost daily basis.

Turning off the junk-mail filter does not mean the end of troubles.

Consider the case of Ephraim Jobickson, a graduating senior wading through the pharmacy school admissions process. Many schools send out supplemental applications to those who have already submitted their main applications. One such school sent him an application on Jan. 1. It was never delivered to his OU mail inbox. “I could have interviewed at that school in early January,” he said. “But then because I did not receive the e-mail I had to resubmit a supplemental application in the middle of February.”

Punctuality is certainly of the essence in health-related graduate school admissions processes. An earlier interview often means a higher chance of getting in or better access to scholarship funds.

The university’s e-mail system should not cause problems for hopeful students. This is especially true because students are required to pay several Internet, e-mail and technology-related fees each semester. Much of that money is put to great use, seen by the expansion of wireless Internet all across campus.

But some of that attention should be given to the OU mail system.

Periodic slowdowns and overhauls are necessary. However, those slowdowns and periods of inoperability should come with prior warning. This would allow students time to complete important or time-sensitive communications before or after the period of inoperability.

The OU IT department advises deleting old messages to maintain optimum e-mail service, and cites the sheer amount of mail as a cause for its service hiccups. Couldn’t messages left on the server be automatically deleted by the IT department? If mail left at a post office is disposed of after so many days, why can’t that same practice be adopted for e-mails? This would likely make the mail system more reliable and very few would complain about not being able to find old e-mails from several months ago in their inboxes.

An overload of messages is not the only problem, and fixing that is not a miracle fix for OU mail’s problems. Our mail system is one that is made to use to maintain timely communication with many different entities on campus and off. We pay much in terms of technology-related fees to this university.

That entitles us to a stable, functional e-mail system that works like it’s supposed to.

If you disagree with me, feel free to send your comments to dailyopinion@ou.edu. Given the state of OU mail, they might not arrive.