“For the most part, students think it needs improvement,” said Thomas Davis, director of Academic Computing and Network Services. “We agree with that, so we threw out some proposals.”

On Nov. 8, David Gift, vice provost for MSU libraries, and Davis attended a Student Assembly meeting to answer questions and provide the representatives with four possible ideas.

ASMSU is MSU’s undergraduate student government.

Those possibilities include: continuing with the system the way it is now, completely revamping it, which would cost between $1 million and $2 million per year, outsourcing all mail to Google or Microsoft or having a forward-only method.

Davis said he is not telling the Student Assembly what to do or that anything is final — they are simply suggestions.

“We proposed the forward-only possibility to the assembly because we think it hits the right targets and solves all the problems students have,” Davis said. “It may not be the perfect solution, but when thinking about a number of variables, it hits those targets.”

Davis said it won’t cost the university “an arm and a leg.” Forwarding provides students a choice between many e-mail services.

Students would still have an MSU e-mail address, just no MSU-based mailbox, he said.

Twenty percent of students forward their mail to another provider, Davis said. Gift and Davis also mentioned that Google and Microsoft were the two companies that voiced interest in giving MSU “free services” if the university outsources to them.

Yet Davis said it’s not as simple as it sounds.

“It locks students in,” he said. “They want to get (students) to use their products as students. But after leaving MSU, they can throw banner (advertisements) at you. They want you using their network.”

Northwestern University recently outsourced to Google’s mail system, Gmail — a transition that Northwestern no preference sophomore Elyse Schwartz said was a great decision.

“It’s not hard to do,” she said. “We have more options than the old system. If I accidentally deleted something, there was no way of getting it back.”

Currently, about 3 million e-mails are processed within Webmail every day.

There are 165,000 MSU e-mail accounts and 20 percent of them have SPAM-blocking preference on.

But Osman Elfaki, vice chairperson for student programming, said he would be disappointed if mail.msu.edu was phased out.

“It would be nicer to upgrade our current system so students could maintain what they already have,” he said. “We are a big university and a Big Ten school … We have the resources. It might be costly, but we should be keeping up with it.”