We take Webmail for granted. Most of us have free Gmail and Yahoo mail accounts. It is easy, then, for students to be flippant about e-mail service. We want fast e-mail service. We expect it to be secure. We want our messages to be backed up. We want calendars. And we want messaging. We want; we want.And the truth is that our e-mail system is being stretched. According to the Office of Information Technology, we manage 98,000 accounts, and that number is growing. Students are in need of more mail quota and reliable service, but as the number of accounts has grown, campus IT has seen a degradation in service. What should be done?Apparently, the answer is to outsource our messages to Google’s Gmail — at least, that is what many students think.At best, jumping to that conclusion demonstrates a disappointing lack of understanding of the issues related to choosing an e-mail system. At worst, it shows that students have been swept away by Google’s ubiquity and sexiness.The issues at hand are easy to enumerate. Privacy should be of paramount concern to students. We often send grades (and other very personal information) to each other via e-mail. Right now, NCSU has very strict control over who can access our messages. Our e-mails are stored on computers that are literally kept under lock-and-key on our campus. Nobody is getting into those messages without a court order.What happens when we outsource? Gmail reads our messages and uses its contents to provide advertisements. This is just as much of a privacy invasion as an individual opening letters addressed to my home, and then then sending me advertisements based on those letters. And there is no guarantee that Google will fight for our privacy if a third party wants access to our messages.Then again, in an age where we post naked drunk pictures of ourselves on the Internet, we have long relinquished our expectation of privacy.Sustainability is also a problem. What happens when Gmail’s business model changes? Will these services be around forever? Once we choose an external provider, we are beholden to them. Since IT changes so quickly, it would be silly for the University to commit to one provider for the next decade.There are other issues that students never see. Will our e-mail be backed up? How will we retrieve those backups? How can we ensure uptime and reliability? These are nuances that are overlooked when people should “Google!” as their mantra.OIT has a vested interest in making sure that student e-mail is running; they exist to serve the students and faculty, and those individuals are dedicated to making sure that we don’t ever have to worry about how e-mail works. Other companies, however, are driven by market and profit. Before we outsource, we need to demand that a company meet our expectations for privacy, security, and sustainability. If not, then, well, I can do without a fancy calendar.Send Jay your thoughts on the University’s e-mail system to [email protected].