yea this really jumped out at me. it's not just to verify receipt, it's all kinds of control (eg going into a box and deleting a message). the journalist is blindingly ignorant of the domain. i guess they were just desperate to provide some kind of insight of their own at the end.
Isn't this a bit circular? You need a controlled university email system... so that you have control over it?
If users were expected to get by using their own email addresses, there'd never be a reason to go in and delete a message for them.
The author's musing about why the university even needs to run an email system is more valid than I think either of you above are giving credit for (I think the verify-ability issue is also overblown.. university students should be held to a personal responsibility standard where you don't need technical 'verify-ability'... these aren't high school students).
However, I can think of at least one area where not providing an official school email address would become a problem -- many student educational discount programs require an .edu address.
>university students should be held to a personal responsibility standard where you don't need technical 'verify-ability'... these aren't high school students).
Fair enough. But, in my experience, "my" generation doesn't know any more about computers than their grandmothers. In theory, you could insist that they be responsible for their own e-mail. In practice it'd be a disaster. Even if the e-mail system were perfect, messages would still get lost. Messages would still get accidentally deleted. Having an e-mail system under university control means that mistakes can be undone by the central helpdesk as well as the user.
Another issue with allowing personal e-mail is archiving. If the university is under legal obligation to archive emails, it's much simpler to have a central e-mail system that all messages pass through. That way, there's no legal liability resulting from messages not being archived properly.
