MSU Red Cedar Message Board

The only reason I want to keep it is for nostalgic purposes. Oh well all good things come to an end. Bye bye MSU mail

I'm part of the alumni association. Doesn't do much for me, really. I view it only as a donation.

Even if you join the Alumni Association, you don't get to keep your msu.edu address.

We should seriously launch some kind of formal protest. It worked for the new Spartan Logo. Maybe it'll work for this. I'm still paying for my MSU education. They can't keep a damn email account open for me? Not even a forward? What a joke.

Wow. Overreact much?

I don't think i really care. Stopped using it once i graduated and saw how much better gmail is. Furthermore, who still uses email to contact other people? Isn't it just for getting online order confirmations??

You guys are looking at it all wrong. At least you're young enough that you had an MSU email address.

I'm going to echo what everyone above has said.

I use that account for all of my important and official accounts. This is going to be a pain in the bum back tracking and figuring out all of my old login IDs so I can get in and change my email address on the account.

1) MSU Webmail has been a joke and a rolling 10 years behind the latest technology. The only reason I used it was for the @msu.edu domain which gave me both pride and clout.

2) This alumni won't be donating any time soon. My excuse the last 7 years has been that I paid them enough in parking tickets and fines that I've already donated more than enough. I was finally coming around to dumping that excuse, but this reignites the fire.

3) With the cost of storage space these days, this action is absurd when being taken as a cost measure. Many alternatives were identified earlier in this thread. On top of that, even though everyone is allocated 1 GB, what % of people are even close to utilizing that space? I'd venture an uneducated guess that 75% of that "allocated space" wasn't even being used.

Great job MSU.

Even when I was in school in the late 90s, I had both my msu.edu account and a Hotmail account. I used the msu.edu address for MSU related stuff and official stuff---the rest (now GMail) is all personal. I don't even store my msu.edu email on the server--I download it directly and delete the server copy. I maybe have a couple of web pages on the AFS space (I don't even remember how to log on to that now, nor do I really care).

To me, this just shows how far MSU still has to come institutionally when relating to its alumni populations. It makes sense to try to be efficient technologically, but what percentage of the 300,000 accounts they're going to wax are utilized actively? I'd bet less than 10%, if that. Most graduates have their own personal email accounts and probably a work account, and they stop using msu's email shortly after graduation. Those that continue to use it do so because they're proud of the domain name (something not to be underestimated) or because it's an actual resource for them.

I'm willing to bet that MSU IT didn't even think to ask the Alumni Association what they thought of the idea or have someone from University Advancement at the table (i.e. to tell them how many primary email addresses in their constituent database are msu.edu addresses). IT and Advancement could have run a cross-link between the two tables to see how many are active.

Someday, MSU will learn that sometimes it's the little things that matter. Bulldoze a crumbling, decrepit building, people can understand that. Mess with something that affects people's affinity to MSU, like the email addresses, or the Spartan logo--in time, those things add up.

I suggest any members of the Alumni Association send an email or tweet to Scott Westerman of the AA, and voice your displeasure.

He's a good guy so be cordial.

Maybe he can at least represent us to MSU IT if he gets enough feedback.

This is bullshit. I have used that email address for ten years. I don't even know where to begin to unravel this mess. Every important thing I've done for the past ten years has used this email address and now I have three weeks to change all that.

Why not simply keep it as a forwarding address? Or give us far more notice?

I'm pretty sure they've sent emails before regarding the shut off.

I like having the email address too...but I certainly don't use it for much....especially for anything important for just this reason.

I got an email about this a couple months ago. I stopped using the MSU address while still in school because it was slow and shitty. It has been over two years since graduation though. I forwarded everything to GMail, and whatever was lost, well...