Discontinuation of Student Computer Science Email

  • Author:
    n/a
  • Send To:
    Department of Computer Science
  • Sponsored By:
  • More Info at:
Are you the Author?
On May 5th the UMass Lowell Computer Science Department administration sent out a notice to all computer science students that they will be discontinuing computer science email accounts as of June 22nd 2009. This includes all graduate and undergraduate email addresses that use @cs.uml.edu as the email routing domain. Details of this discontinuation of service to the students can be found at http://www.cs.uml.edu/email-changes.pdf

We, the students of this department, would like to respectfully request that the administration reconsider this decision and allow the students to have a voice in how this transition is made. Specifically, students who have established their professional identity using the department's domain would like to be able to retain their accounts.

We respect the need for centralizing services and resources in the university to minimize cost, but we would like to voice several alternatives to a complete discontinuation of computer science unix email services to students.

Please sign this petition by Friday, May 15th. Your signature will be anonomized and we will not publish this information and will not share it with anyone without your permission. You can optionally leave any comments in the fields below.

99 Signatures

  • Kate Tsui
    • Status: graduate, undergrad, faculty, staff
    • Graduate
    • Comments
    • I publish papers with this email address. It is my professional identity and recognized by my colleagues.
  • Beibei Yang
    • Status: graduate, undergrad, faculty, staff
    • graduate
  • Mark Micire
    • Status: graduate, undergrad, faculty, staff
    • graduate
    • Comments
    • Please maintain accounts for graduate students that are vouched for by professors.
  • Philip Kovac
    • Status: graduate, undergrad, faculty, staff
    • undergrad
  • Munjal Desai
  • Justin Richer
    • Status: graduate, undergrad, faculty, staff
    • Graduate
    • Comments
    • Our cs email is part of our identity with the college. If you're not going to give it to students, don't give it to anyone.
  • Mark Sherman
    • Status: graduate, undergrad, faculty, staff
    • Graduate
  • matt bailey
    • Status: graduate, undergrad, faculty, staff
    • Grad
    • Comments
    • I still have my email fwd'd to me and will be sorry to see it go. I've been able to keep up with the de community and reach out when job and internship oppurtunities are available.
  • michaelpenta
    • Status: graduate, undergrad, faculty, staff
    • Graduate
  • Ross
    • Status: graduate, undergrad, faculty, staff
    • Undergrad
  • Mary Beth Smrtic
  • Adam Russell
    • Status: graduate, undergrad, faculty, staff
    • graduate
  • Amanda Courtemanche
    • Status: graduate, undergrad, faculty, staff
    • Undergrad
  • Michael Ouellette
    • Status: graduate, undergrad, faculty, staff
    • graduate
  • Nathan Rackliffe
    • Status: graduate, undergrad, faculty, staff
    • graduate
    • Comments
    • When publishing papers, it is important to be able to present myself professionaly. Having a CS domain email account is expected in our field.
  • Matthew F. Ouellette
    • Status: graduate, undergrad, faculty, staff
    • graduate
  • Jarred McCaffrey
    • Status: graduate, undergrad, faculty, staff
    • graduate
  • hengky susanto
    • Status: graduate, undergrad, faculty, staff
    • В
    • Comments
    • At tleast, the CS dept provides a mechanism that forward the email to different email account.
  • Kareem Abu-Zahra
  • Jesse Lucas
    • Status: graduate, undergrad, faculty, staff
    • undergrad/graduate
    • Comments
    • I use my CS email more than my University email and would feel a great loss if it were to be discontinued.
  • Michael Pepe
    • Status: graduate, undergrad, faculty, staff
    • Alum
  • Patrick Lozzi
    • Status: graduate, undergrad, faculty, staff
    • Senior
    • Comments
    • I've used this address for years in regard to professional contacts and communication. I think I can speak for some of the student body that utilizes cs.uml.edu email, when I say that I enjoy being associated with the department in my email communications. Simply put, it presents a professional appearance and gives one association with their Major department that I've no doubt found useful. It's in my opinion, that it is more professional than something like GMail or Yahoo, etc. To this end, it's even more professional than "student.email.edu", which I never use simply because of that reason.
  • Jozef N
    • Status: graduate, undergrad, faculty, staff
    • alumni
  • Patrick
    • Status: graduate, undergrad, faculty, staff
    • Senior
    • Comments
    • (Ran out of room previously) Getting a little political maybe, I find it difficult to believe the reason of "cost" for removing this feature of our department. It's no secret that school fees and tuition rise every single year -- even in a recession!? Give me a break. As a suggestion, if it truly is cost effeciency you're after, why not take on Junior/Senior or Graduate level students, with the task of assisting the department with the email server? It might be difficult to give students of any kind the level of trust to run a mail server, but why not they be supervised by either faculty or staff? Besides, communication should be encrypted anyhow. This would give students some level of experience with the server and you could find students to work without pay -- simply to gain the experience. Whatever the problem, this is the CS dept -- we find solutions to problems. Getting rid of the mail server for student use is not acceptable, nor is it a solution.
  • Ryan Tucker
    • Status: graduate, undergrad, faculty, staff
    • graduate
  • Paul D Hestand
    • Status: graduate, undergrad, faculty, staff
    • Graduate
    • Comments
    • В
  • Andrew Oswald
    • Status: graduate, undergrad, faculty, staff
    • grad
    • Comments
    • Discontinuing e-mails is a good way to loose track of alums, and the network, funding and support they provide.
  • Elizabeth DeMarco
    • Status: graduate, undergrad, faculty, staff
    • Graduate
  • Fanhai Yang
    • Status: graduate, undergrad, faculty, staff
    • Student
  • Jonathan Ong
    • Status: graduate, undergrad, faculty, staff
    • Alumni
    • Comments
    • I have been using my cs.uml.edu address for nearly 10 years. I have begun moving related services and contacts away from my cs.uml.edu address but it is a monumental task. I find it surprising the CS department would remove such a basic service. I understand there is a cost to run such a service, however I cannot imagine that it would be difficult to run a concurrent cs.uml.edu mail server alongside student.uml.edu. Online petitions rarely work and I do not expect this to provide the result we desire and I will begrudgingly continue to migrate off of cs.uml.edu. Please reconsider, perhaps discontinue cs.uml.edu service in 2 or 3 years, and do not provide new addresses starting with the fall class. It seems fairly simple to ease the pain.
  • Swati Verma
    • Status: graduate, undergrad, faculty, staff
    • graduate
    • Comments
    • Please do not discontinue the unix email account
  • Nicholas LaVertue
    • Status: graduate, undergrad, faculty, staff
    • Undergrad
  • Andy Dufilie
    • Status: graduate, undergrad, faculty, staff
    • graduate
    • Comments
    • I'd prefer to be able to forward my CS email account to a different email address of my choice (not @student.uml.edu)
  • Chris Robichaud
    • Status: graduate, undergrad, faculty, staff
    • Former undergrad, now graduate student
    • Comments
    • I find that emails in my CS account generally are far more relevant to me, especially now that I am a part-time student.
  • Zheng Fang
    • Status: graduate, undergrad, faculty, staff
    • Graduate
  • Ankur Parikh
    • Status: graduate, undergrad, faculty, staff
    • graduate
  • Alex Baumann
    • Status: graduate, undergrad, faculty, staff
    • graduate
    • Comments
    • I want to be able to keep this email permanently and it is more professional for me to be using for work within my lab. the student.uml.edu addresses are simply not professional enough and i get tons of school related "spam" to those addresses
  • Heather Byrne
    • Status: graduate, undergrad, faculty, staff
    • undergraduate
    • Comments
    • My business cards have this email address on them
  • Chandan Krishnegowda
    • Status: graduate, undergrad, faculty, staff
    • graduate
    • Comments
    • I dont see the reason. Its already there. Let it be.
  • Chase Isabelle
    • Status: graduate, undergrad, faculty, staff
    • Undergraduate
  • Anwar Saipulla
    • Status: graduate, undergrad, faculty, staff
    • grad student
    • Comments
    • Accounts for those who are using it everyday should be kept.
  • Roxann Weir
    • Status: graduate, undergrad, faculty, staff
    • undergrad
    • Comments
    • В
  • Adam Fraser
    • Status: graduate, undergrad, faculty, staff
    • graduate alum
    • Comments
    • В
  • Kevin Yang
  • Harshavardhan D Achrekar
    • Status: graduate, undergrad, faculty, staff
    • graduate
    • Comments
    • В
  • Simone Hill
    • Status: graduate, undergrad, faculty, staff
    • Alumni
    • Comments
    • Couldn't the domain just be moved over to where the student.uml.edu email addresses would be moved?
  • Haiyang Zhang
    • Status: graduate, undergrad, faculty, staff
    • grad
  • Matt Fielding
    • Status: graduate, undergrad, faculty, staff
    • undergrad
  • Damon Berry
    • Status: graduate, undergrad, faculty, staff
    • graduate (doctoral student)
    • Comments
    • aparently "some animals are more equal than other animals"
  • Pankaj Arora
    • Status: graduate, undergrad, faculty, staff
    • Alumni