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Gmail Ate My Homework!

Boston College Will Stop Offering New Students E-Mail Accounts

Instead of a standard college e-mail account, next year’s freshmen will be offered an e-mail-forwarding service that will pass along messages to whatever personal e-mail account a student specifies, said Mary C. Corcoran, associate vice president for user and support services at the college. A student named John Smith might be given the address johnsmith@bc.edu, for instance, but the address will simply pass any incoming mail along to Mr. Smith’s Google mailbox, or to his Microsoft Hotmail, or to any other account the student might already have. The college currently runs such a forwarding service for alumni.

This sounds like a bad idea. When the institution provides a mail system, you can reasonably expect students to be responsible for reading what's sent there. Not so when you're just letting it go off to where ever. Most school email systems let you configure your account to forward elsewhere but when you choose to do that you're still responsible for what was sent to your school address.

Maybe BC has a web-based course system that's used for all important class information so school email isn't so important.

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