Overcoming CubMail

As the semester ends, seniors are reminded that their official transition from CubMail to Gmail—one sign of becoming Columbia alumni—is only a few months away. Along with everything else they will have to organize as they prepare to leave Columbia, seniors must sort through the entire contents of their CubMail storage quotas to back up important e-mails, lest they be deleted. Columbia University Information Technology should facilitate the digital transition from student to alumnus by implementing for all students a phased replacement of CubMail with an e-mail service similar to the one the University offers to alumni now.

CubMail is woefully outdated. With its clunky interface and relatively limited 500 MiB storage quota, its commercial competitors, such as Gmail, easily outstrip it. Many students already use these alternatives because they are simpler and have greater functionality. Alumni can choose to forward the e-mails that are sent to uni@columbia.edu addresses to another account. However, they lose access to all their stored data roughly nine months after graduating. Alumni must duplicate their CubMail data if they wish to access it after the grace period. The University would have to purchase more storage space for every new generation of students if it did not remove the alumni’s information. But having to transfer this data is also extremely inconvenient for those who have accumulated years’ worth of information on the University’s server.

CUIT should introduce for undergraduates the same system that is already accessible to alumni with @caa.columbia.edu addresses—free Web-based e-mail through Gmail. Gmail boasts 14 times more storage space than CubMail and offers many robust features that are absent from the University’s reigning system. Current students who have their e-mail automatically forwarded from CubMail to another address effectively circumvent the inconvenience of copying their important e-mails upon graduating. However, many others are unaware of this option or lack the technical prowess to take advantage of it. At the very least, CUIT should offer to help recent graduates transfer their data from one server to the next.

Replacing CubMail would do much more than facilitating student access to a more robust e-mail system. It would ease the transition from student to alumnus, and lighten the load on Columbia’s own servers, as there would be no need to store thousands of student e-mails on local computers. CubMail is behind the times, and the University and its students would benefit greatly from its replacement.