Dear Answer Girl,
Why don’t ETSU students – including the Answer Girl – use the ETSU IMail accounts that the university provides? It would be much easier if faculty could be sure that e-mails sent to those accounts are actually read – or at least forwarded to be read.
Frustrated Faculty MemberAu contraire, mon professor. The Answer Girl does, in fact, use her ETSU IMail account. If you want to get really particular about it, she gets messages from both her IMail and her “regular” e-mail delivered to her desktop e-mail program.
But, enough about the Answer Girl. And enough of referring to her/me in the third person. Let’s get down to the question.
To really get to the meat of this issue, I performed a series of highly formalized and professional interviews with two real-life ETSU students and one faculty member, as well as a well-planned and appropriately rigorous scientific experiment.
The interview questions included: 1. Are you now, or have you ever been an ETSU student, and/or have you ever been on the ETSU campus? 2. Can you operate a computer mouse? 3. If you could choose any word/ phrase/name for your e-mail, what would it be? 4. Have you ever received a notice of a fine at the Sherrod Library?
I cleverly disguised the purpose of my interview, as you can see, to insure unbiased information.
Question No. 1 checked ETSU student/faculty status – the individual I designated as “faculty” was markedly older than the two “students,” thus resulting in the alternate label.
Question No. 2 revealed computer abilities. All interviewees proved themselves extremely computer-proficient by answering, “Yes,” to this question.
The most pertinent questions were obviously No. 3 and No. 4. Surprisingly, none of my interviewees selected, “Z followed by my initials and a random number,” as his or her preferred e-mail name. Clearly, this is a strong indicator of the rationale behind student reluctance to use the dreaded IMail.
When queried for an e-mail address, what student wants to utter zdum1354@imail.etsu.edu when such tantalizing options as Hot_FatChik24@hotmail.com or ILuvPickles@yahoo.com exist?
As for the Sherrod Library notices, which are all sent automatically to the offending individual’s IMail account, none of my interviewees had ever seen one, revealing that 100 percent of students and faculty routinely fail to check their IMail accounts. This had turned out to be a more serious problem than I had previously thought.
At this point, I concluded that no one uses IMail, and one reason is that the z-name is horribly uninspiring.
Further evidence was needed, however, to solve the mystery of the anti-IMail sentiment at ETSU. (Here is where the scientific experiment comes into play, in case you were wondering.)
Using an extremely rigid set of controls, I accessed both my IMail account and another online e-mail account, which will remain nameless for copyright reasons. I used the highly precise chrono feature on my digital wristwatch to measure the time it took to reach each respective site, log in, and load the in-box page.
IMail turned up with a dismal 45.77 seconds due to both the generally slow loading time and the additional entry page in which I was asked to accept or reject some sort of policy. I did not stop to read the policy – I don’t think anyone in the history of the Internet has ever stopped to read such a policy – so there was no additional time lost.
In contrast, I successfully accessed nameless online e-mail site’s in-box page in 17.03 seconds. That is a difference of nearly 30 seconds!
I need no more evidence; the answer is clear. Instead of wasting valuable minutes of their lives waiting for IMail to load and reading security policies, ETSU students have intelligently opted to use the non-IMail e-mail provider of their choice.
Perhaps with a technological overhaul and an aggressive campaign, students could be convinced … but as of now, IMail is just out of luck.

Editors Note: Student IMail accounts can be automatically forwarded to another e-mail address of your choice so you don’t have to bother with checking it at all … just go to the dropdown menu and select “forwarding.”