With e-mail, Microsoft looks to hook students 'for life'

Sees the hosting of college e-mail systems as opportunity to grab a demographic, and says, "It all boils down to advertising."

The story "With e-mail, Microsoft looks to hook students 'for life'" published April 21, 2006 at 2:58 AM is no longer available on CNET News.

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Disgusting

Like students don't have enough to worry about. Now they have Microsoft e-mail viruses and lack of exposure to standards based products like the rest of the world is migrating to.

[VidPro]

"Read my lips ..."

So after quite publicly saying the following:

"Our communication assets (e-mail, MSN messenger) are one
great way to add new people onto our network and establish
lifetime loyalty," said Walter Harp, Microsoft's senior product
manager in charge of the Windows Live@edu project.

Microsoft promises most colleges not to display ads while the
students are in school, but then will turn on the ads once they
graduate, creating a pool of young, educated and potentially
wealthy consumers for advertisers to target.

"It all boils down to advertising."
--Walter Harp, Microsoft senior product manager

"When you look at that demographic, everybody is after them.
They're extremely hot," said Harp.

So if after all that it seems Microsoft is being self-serving, don't
you believe it, since the article concludes with:

... it still encounters the occasional skeptics who are suspicious
of why big Microsoft wants to host college e-mail.

Harp often spends time assuring colleges that there are no
ulterior motives: "There are no hobgoblins in the closet."

[BMR777]

@college.edu address for life?

Usually when a student graduates a university their personal web space and all that stuff is deleted, right?

Who is really going to be using a school provided email address ending in .edu for life? Also is this something that the schools want?

Students should have personal email accounts through Gmail (yay) and only use .edu accounts while in school. Microsoft seems to be banking on a user keeping the .edu email for life.

BMR777
<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.rusnakweb.com" target="_newWindow">http://www.rusnakweb.com</a>

[hadaso]

college.edu domain acuired by MSN for life

If [e-mail] can keep this address for life as an MSN customer, it means no other student named Bob at that college would be able to use that address. And it means that the college has lost control of the domain (or it can regain the domain, but then bob@ would not be able to use it for email through MSN).

[BMR777]

@college.edu address for life?

Usually when a student graduates a university their personal web space and all that stuff is deleted, right?

Who is really going to be using a school provided email address ending in .edu for life? Also is this something that the schools want?

Students should have personal email accounts through Gmail (yay) and only use .edu accounts while in school. Microsoft seems to be banking on a user keeping the .edu email for life.

BMR777
<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.rusnakweb.com" target="_newWindow">http://www.rusnakweb.com</a>

[hadaso]

Can they get their email?

Would this deal include POP3/IMAP4/Webdav access to email?

Currently free Hotmail accounts cannot move their email off the Hotmail system. This is not the same as Gmail, that allows users to access their accounts using POP3. This means that a Gmail user can access the account using standards based software and copy the content into another account at a different provider. Hotmail provides no mechanism to pull out a message. You can only read it through the web based interface, and you have no access to the source. You have no way to backup or archive your email if it's in Hotmail (except for very old accounts that used webdav access for years. I can still pull the email out of my old Hotmail account that I have since 1998 because I used webdav access regularly. And it's still unreliable: there was a period of several months in the past that it did't work).

My recommendation to a college student is to get a decent email account outside of their colege, and if they can afford a bit less than $10 a year to register their own domain. The college address, wether hosted by MSN or Gmail or on the college's own servers would eventually suffer unreliability and lots of spam with little control over filtering it. Don't count on getting all your email on an MSN/Hotmail/any.edu account. When it's time to get job offers, or replies to job applications, you would want a reliable email provider.