Upon logging into TigerMail accounts, students may have recently been prompted to accept a new Terms of Service agreement.
This difference is one of many changes made when Google altered University accounts to make them look more like personal Gmail accounts.
Google used to maintain two databases, one for Google Apps like TigerMail, and one for regular Gmail accounts, said Sheri Thompson, IT planning and communications officer.
Under this old setup, TigerMail users could access both a Gmail account and a TigerMail account in separate tabs of a single browser.
However, now that TigerMail accounts act more like regular Gmail accounts than Google Apps accounts, users can only access one account at a time through a single browser, forcing some users to constantly sign in and out of accounts.
Sarah Alem, international studies sophomore, said the new setup is a hassle.
“I noticed I couldn’t use my Gmail account and my TigerMail account at the same time,” Alem said. “It’s kind of inconvenient now to have to sign in to one and sign out of the other.”
Thompson said there is a solution for students to stay signed in to multiple accounts.
“What we recommend you do is open another browser — say, use Firefox for Gmail and open TigerMail on [Google] Chrome,” Thompson said. “Google does provide a fix to access multiple accounts at once, but we found it doesn’t work very well.”
Other subtle differences include visual and functional changes, such as moved buttons and the addition of the “call phone” feature.
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Contact Morgan Searles at [email protected]