The Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting that in a recent move Boston College has stopped offering incoming students mandatory email accounts. The move was due to the fact that many incoming students already have an email account elsewhere. So instead, BC will offer an email forwarding service.

If incoming student John Doe already has an email address at GMAIL, the forwarding service will pass along the email to the student's private account. This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it will forward to [email protected]This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

According to the Chronicle, the move will allow students to choose their email service provider that they are familiar with.

Hmmmm.... That sounds a lot like a real estate company. A group of individuals with a common membership, instead of forcing them to be part of a system, they're allowing them to choose what system the members want to utilize.

With the offices that we've worked with, agents and brokers tend to like this... when it works. While on the surface this is great, in the long run, this is impractical if not nearly impossible. I'm not trying to be a mind reader here but this will last maybe a few weeks before they switch back.

Reliability and Guaranteed Delivery

The issue becomes reliability and guaranteed delivery. The University can not guarantee that students will ever receive the email.

They'll eventually get complaints about not receiving email messages. For example, "OK, class, submit your homework which I emailed to you."

"I never received the email!" cries out a student. Now what? Do you place the blame on the student, University or one of the email systems? This simply leads to lost productivity.

Multiply this a couple of thousand times a week and this will lead to a decline in productivity (in this case, grades). Eventually they'll review the policy and change it something like, "Official business will be handled through the University's email system." In other words, they will only guarantee email delivery to the student's real inbox and not to their forwarding email address.

A Few Items To Consider

Here's a few items for companies that are doing this need to consider:

Are they going to simply redirect all email to the private account? Or are they going to filter the account first?

If they simply redirect all email to the private account, the system will be blocked by many systems across the world simply because there's too much spam going around. Only about 25% of messages going through our systems are actual email that gets sent. The rest get filtered by one of the hoops that we have the email jump through. So instead of delivering 1 million emails, we only deliver 250,000 messages. Delivering the rest would certainly tip off the receiving company, like GMAIL, that BC was a source of spam. After all, they're sending 750,000 junk mail messages.

If they filter it first, now there's too many places to check. Is the message in my BC junkmail folder? My GMAIL inbox? Or my GMAIL junkmail folder? Or my OUTLOOK junkmail folder? Or my NORTON junkmail folder (which is on OUTLOOK)?

What happens when an email provider blocks email from BC? Say GMAIL blacklists BC.edu? Do you think that a BC tech rep is going to call GMAIL and get it sorted out quickly? Not likely.

Everyone On The Same System

The only way to guarantee communication is by putting everyone on the same system. This is the strength behind FaceBook, LinkedIn and Twitter... everyone is on the same system. It simplifies communication. Even Ebay only guarantees communication through their "message center." I can only imagine that through the years, they've learned the hard way the same idea.

As a company with employees, this is sometimes easier. Companies will have the added burden of training their employees but they'll eventually get it. With real estate brokers this can be complicated as you can't force agents to do anything. They simply won't.

It would be my dream that all real estate agents would be "on the same system." Agents would get all their messages, clients wouldn't have to wait unnecessarily and system admins would have to explain how to check junkmail in multiple places. The world would be a better place.

Final Advice

So to all the incoming freshmen at BC (and all real estate companies), I wish you well and hand you some advice... stick with the real BC.edu email account they give you. Oh, and check it too.