Hey everyone, so rather than just talk about how crappy I may think our e-mail system is I wanted to get some input. How do you feel about your e-mail system right now? Do you already forward it to something like Hotmail or Gmail? Is this something you care about?

I have included a document about Google talks about wants, what Muss offers, what Google offers etc. Let me know what you think!

Also I have not done too much research into what Microsoft offers, or other companies but I will try to invite Microsoft to do a demonstration/information period at the next meeting. In the meantime here is a link to what they offer to universities.

http://www.microsoft.com/liveatedu/free-email-accounts.aspx?locale= en-ca&country=CA

So post, ask questions and use the poll!

I've barely been here a year... My elementary school's email system, over 4 years ago, was at least as sophisticated as the current email system here. You know you need a new system when...

You do know that you can link hotmail/gmail with your mugsi account?

Well aware. But also told by some profs that they have had technical difficulties with this before, where certain things, for one reason or another, won't go through.

I also don't think that it is very efficient to have one mail system for ELM, and another for school, and your 3rd, personal one. Why can't it all be integrated better?

I could keep going on this There's also the issue of having something like a 2 bit limit on the email inbox... You receive more than a few emails, suddenly inbox is full.

Mail systems shouldnt be left alone to rot, just because you can mask it up by linking it to your personal email: It needs to be looked after at least a couple times each decade if it's costly, and we should probably have a look at it before we get too far into this millenium too

Originally Posted by Cassanova

You do know that you can link hotmail/gmail with your mugsi account?

Not quite.

You can set it up so mail is forwarded to your Hotmail/gmail, but all the limitation of MUSS still apply. MUSS has only a 15MB inbox limit, and it also has a cap on the file size you can attach (something less than 1mb or something ridiculous).

When your MUSS inbox gets full (which happens like three times a semester...) it stops receiving email, so the forwarding system is useless.

The other thing is, when it comes to groupwork and stuff, a consolidated email system with document and calendar sharing abilities kicks ass. When people are forwarding to gmail/hotmail/ymail etc, there isn't a proper way to collaborate on documents.

If everyone is on one system (I wholeheartedly endorse Google... as MDL will tell you) then it make everything easier because you KNOW everyone has the capability.

It also means a lot easier to communicate with profs, who also don't have a ridiculous email system (UnivMail is even older).

I would rather have a consolidated system for my mcmaster.ca email.

Originally Posted by rohan10

Not quite.

You can set it up so mail is forwarded to your Hotmail/gmail, but all the limitation of MUSS still apply. MUSS has only a 15MB inbox limit,

When your MUSS inbox gets full (which happens like three times a semester...) it stops receiving email, so the forwarding system is useless

it does get forwarded but you can delete it straight from hotmail and it gives the ability to compose messages with @mcmaster.ca. I haven't had any problems with it filling up, delete your old emails, stop keeping them, especially ones you don't need.. just goes to show how lazy people are these days....

and btw. you do realize that switching to a new email application is a programming nightmare... this is one of those changes that won't happen like ELM and Mugsi/SOLAR.

Originally Posted by rohan10

Not quite.

You can set it up so mail is forwarded to your Hotmail/gmail, but all the limitation of MUSS still apply. MUSS has only a 15MB inbox limit, and it also has a cap on the file size you can attach (something less than 1mb or something ridiculous).

When your MUSS inbox gets full (which happens like three times a semester...) it stops receiving email, so the forwarding system is useless.

The other thing is, when it comes to groupwork and stuff, a consolidated email system with document and calendar sharing abilities kicks ass. When people are forwarding to gmail/hotmail/ymail etc, there isn't a proper way to collaborate on documents.

If everyone is on one system (I wholeheartedly endorse Google... as MDL will tell you) then it make everything easier because you KNOW everyone has the capability.

It also means a lot easier to communicate with profs, who also don't have a ridiculous email system (UnivMail is even older).

I would rather have a consolidated system for my mcmaster.ca email.

Actually Gmail can be set up as your normal every day email client (think Outlook). I have been using this setup for 3 years now with no problem. I am sending and receiving emails on my McMaster account through Gmail. Emails do not get stored on the MUSS server so my inbox never gets full.

As for collaboration, I have used Google Groups / Calendars very successfully without having it integrated with my McMaster email.

All it takes is a little elbow grease folks!

I agree that its manageable to deal with MUSS. You can avoid using it whenever possible, set it up through Gmail or Thunderbird, etc. I also don't think having access to the rest of the suite (Calendar, Docs, etc) matters that much, since everyone can get access to those anyway for free.

However, I do have a problem with the university spending so much money to prop up an antiquated system. If someone offers to do a service better than you, for cheaper than it costs you to do, why the heck would you do it yourself?

The benefits of letting students keep their mcmaster.ca email for more than 6 months after graduating are huge as well.

I think the last thing we want is the university to attempt to "fix" it and have a re-enactment of ELM and not have our email servers operable for two months. I'd rather just keep this low-tech alternative until someone who actually has heard of the internet gets hired to fix it.

Just don't let the bozos who installed ELM within 100 meters of our email accounts.

Personally I don't really care about MUSS. All I use it for is to send e-mails to Professors and TAs b/c its required. I have their replies forwarded to my g-mail. The e-mails get sent, and there's lots of storage so I don't have to bother deleting crap. Works fine for that.

I'm more concerned about the crapiness of MUGSI and SOLAR.

Well, one of the benefits of switching to Google would be that we would free up server space that could be devoted to MUGSI and SOLAR. I don't know much about how the university has its servers set up now, but it would probably mean a small increase in the number of students who can log in at one time. Not as good as a full overhaul, but its the only practical upgrade that can be made at low cost.

Alrighty a few random comments.

Danny, in your post you have set up email forwarding with MUSS? In that case your McMaster emails are forwarded on your Gmail? Can you also send emails that end with @McMaster.ca as well? I currently forward my Mac Email to Hotmail as well but it is useless to apply to any official email exchange because it gets sent out as my hotmail.

That is the big issue with email forwarding that your sent mails end with either gmail/hotmail.

In regards to Google Docs & Calender collaboration you have to go through the entire process of separately making accounts and inviting people and on on. With Google Apps it is all centralized into one place(In terms of everyone having a Gmail McMaster account); lastly there is an immense immense potential for Google Calendar. Since you can subscribe to various group calendars, faculty societies and MSU for example can put up a central database of events that people can subscribe too.


Right now we have facebook events, MSU Calendar, MacInsiders Calendar. They can all be integrated into one intuitive guide for your week. It will do wonders for informing students and improving engagement.

Plus we also might get the opportunity in future to have access to Version 1.0 of Google Wave which again is an application with immense potential.

A number of us on MacInsiders are pretty okay with technology and internet usage and hence we can multi task with all these applications manually but there still is a significant number of people who cannot manually juggle all these separately.

The University fixing MUSS is a very long term possibility, it will also cost a massive massive amount of money from my talks with the CIO and market research.

Fixing MUGSI & SOLAR is unfortunately a more long term solution; unlike this innovative option for email we do not currently have anything major for MUGSI.

Since it deals with & is directly linked to the registrars office and student records MUGSI will require an even larger investment. Infact MUGSI can only be touched when and if we get $20-25 Million dollars to improve our overall infrastructure and even then it will be based on buying software licensing from specialized companies like People Soft & Banner. They will get in their integration specialists and staff trainers. But in the long run it will be registrar and UTS staff that will run the next iteration of MUGSI/SOLAR. So it will be a similar deal to ELM(Which was entirely bought from Blackboard as a software license)

It is a misconception that UTS came up with ELM with their own programming code. Though the details are contradictory and murky from various sources, last year we had no choice but to replace Webct because a) It's software license had expired and hence it was running on pre historic features b) More Importantly it had reached capacity in terms of the number of students.

So initially Blackboard was assigned to develop ELM, I'm not entirely sure what happened but they bailed out somewhere along the line and UTS developers had to step in to salvage the operation.

With ELM there are fundamental programing errors in relations to the "tabs system" from what I have heard. I believe SRA Engineering directly met with the individual who deals with ELM at UTS and he has a better idea.

Originally Posted by huzaifa47

Alrighty a few random comments.

Danny, in your post you have set up email forwarding with MUSS? In that case your McMaster emails are forwarded on your Gmail? Can you also send emails that end with @McMaster.ca as well? I currently forward my Mac Email to Hotmail as well but it is useless to apply to any official email exchange because it gets sent out as my hotmail.

That is the big issue with email forwarding that your sent mails end with either gmail/hotmail.

When sending a message in hotmail just click on the button "From" and a drop down menu will pop up. You can select [email protected] as the email.


imo MUSS system is perfect. It gets the job done. If you want something more fancy and sophisticated link your account to gmail/hotmail or something that you prefer.

About the calender system, alot of people dont really know what the msu is, or what they do. Having a calender system where it is integrated with something you use every day that could tell you what is happening at your school, and when could be awesome. Not only that you could be able to chat with others, work on documents together in real time and plan a study group's meeting time. Although there are many who have their e-mail forwarded to other accounts, it doesnt always work out perfectly. Instead I think those who do forward it are a good example that a number of students are comfortable with using 3rd party services such as Hotmail or Google.

I couldn't care less to be honest. I forward my e-mails to gmail and I can send e-mails from gmail that will appear to you as @mcmaster.ca. I also set it up that when the muss e-mail forwards, it automatically deletes the e-mails too, so no over usage problem.