Looks as if CUNY will be forcing everyone to use their Hunter emails… this may affect the listserv.  If it does I will have to re-register those of you who have alternate email addresses.  Nothing to worry about today, but if you are not using your Hunter email see below for possible “fixes” if CUNY mandates this.

Though the percentage of students actually using their Hunter e-mail accounts has increased over the years, a large percentage of students still checks messages sent to their Hunter accounts only via forwarding.
According to recent stats from ICIT:

For comparison, there are currently 22646 registered students, all of whom have e-mail accounts. 713 registered students are also staff and have staff accounts instead of student accounts. Of the forwarded accounts, 8682 belong to currently registered students. We now have only 38% of our students forwarding their mail. This used to be nearly 100%.

(Hunter IT Notes (by Frank Steen,  2/20/2008) available in the "Public Information" area of Bb site for the Middle States Self Study "Technology Subgroup" site)

This report does not include specific information on how often the remaining 62% access their Hunter e-mail account directly. But there are frequent complaints from both faculty and staff (in Student Services) that it is difficult to reach ALL students via e-mail in a timely manner.

Now, CUNY is forcing all colleges to move their student e-mail accounts to Microsoft's Live.edu and -- will not allow automatic forwarding any more. Hunter may be able to delay the transfer of student accounts till next year, but basically we have no choice given the strong-arm tactics of CUNY Central.

However, here are two ways to achieve the same objective, i.e., avoiding the need to check several e-mail accounts independently:

A. Use a "POP client" (like Thunderbird, Eudora, MS Outlook, MS Outook Express) on your local computer to check several e-mail accounts (including your live.edu account) simultaneously and without any effort after the initial setup.

B. If you prefer a web interface for your e-mail, use an advanced web client (such as gmail) which can be set up to do the same, i.e., checking additional e-mail accounts. In Gmail, you use a feature called "Mail Fetcher" which can be set up easily ( details: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=21288 , http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=21289 ). Slight drawback (currently): You cannot control the frequency with which these additional accounts are checked, Google will check "regularly", but it does not tell you what exactly "regular" means. Still, a great way not to miss anything sent to your Hunter account.

While the CUNY policy appears to be shortsighted and counterproductive, I am not sure how successful Hunter can be in trying to change it. Rather, we may want to focus on educating users about taking full advantage of premier e-mail services like those offered by gmail (Google).

Currently, despite occasional rumors of imminent attempts, CUNY has not issued a directive on faculty/staff accounts. At least for now, Hunter's e-mail service for faculty and staff will remain the same and will continue to offer automatic forwarding. But faculty/staff should use automatic forwarding or one of the two options described above, to make sure that they will receive all important messages in a timely manner; e.g., messages sent via the "all-faculty" list (which, in contrast to hunter-l, does not even have a web archive) if they prefer not to use their Hunter e-mail account directly.

M.