Thanks to a new university policy, logging into your Gmail account to find all your personal and school e-mails in one convenient place is to become a thing of the past.
All new students at the University of Miami, including freshmen and graduate students, are now required to have a UMail account for all school e-mails. There is no longer the option to have e-mail forwarded through a UM alias to a third party provider of your choice, such as Gmail. The transition will officially take place on August 25, and accounts will be created automatically.
Sophomores, juniors, and seniors are currently not included in the new policy and subsequent switch to the UMail system. However, this is not to say the change will not happen in the future.
According to the FAQ section of the UMail website, the university altered their policy in reaction to the spam filtering systems of e-mail providers. University e-mails were regularly blocked and students were not able to get necessary information.
While the UMail service was once optional for this reason, it is now required. However, the university has failed to recognize that students are easily able to adjust and personalize spam settings on their third party e-mail accounts. It is pointless to make it a requirement, when students could simply be made aware of the situation and prepare accordingly.
Furthermore, requiring students to use solely UMail for their school e-mails is unreasonable. The stresses of college life and hectic schedules do not allow students the luxury of time. Juggling multiple e-mail addresses, and having to be accountable for every single e-mail received on each account, is ridiculous. It adds an unnecessary amount of stress to a student’s life, in particular that of a new student at the university who must deal with this new change in policy.
The university’s decision to make UMail mandatory is hasty. The problems that prompted the decision are solvable, and theoretically will still remain to be a problem for all other students on campus. Why require just the freshmen and graduate students to change over?
Regardless, the new policy is unrealistic when the daily life of a college student is taken into account, as it just makes receiving e-mail more time-consuming. Ironically, transitioning new students to UMail will not solve the problem, since students probably won’t bother to check the separate account.