Students may be noticing emails in their Zimbra inboxes reminding them that they can claim the transfer of their current emails to their new Gmail accounts.
By the beginning of the 2014-15 Academic Year, Zimbra will go away and all students will use Google to access their emails, said Lacey Baze, assistant director of product strategy and communication for Texas A&M Information Technology.
“Texas A&M IT has not stopped assigning the domain of ‘@neo.tamu.edu’ to student email addresses,” Baze said. “This will occur in the fall. All new students have a Zimbra account and will need to visit http://go.google.tamu.edu to claim their Google account.”
The migration will transfer every single email, contact, briefcase and reminder to the new Google service, said Kirk Price, a student worker with help desk central who has been assisting students with the account transfers.
Price said to login to the student’s email account is still the same process.
“The difference is that when they log in, they will use the Google interface instead of the Zimbra one,” Price said. “The migration process will also transfer everything in your Neo account to your new one.”
This change from Zimbra to Gmail was an integral part of the plan designed by the Email Selection Advisory Committee, the TAMU IT Department and Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs, Karan L. Watson, to modernize the email service used, Price said.
“Almost every single student I’ve met decided to forward their Neo emails to their Gmail accounts, simply because Zimbra is very clunky,” Price said. “It was designed in the 1990s and it hasn’t been improved.”
Most complaints related to Zimbra among students were related to the refresh rate and unreliable spam filters, Kirk said.
Kelly Barna, sophomore psychology major, said she prefers Gmail.
“[Zimbra] doesn’t update very efficiently, so it makes it hard to get information on time,” Barna said. “Another thing wrong with it is that its junk mail filter doesn’t work very effectively, so I end up getting a lot of spam.”
In addition to the email service, students will also have the ability to sync their Google Chrome accounts to their TAMU email address, Price said, and will be able to use other Google features such as Google Docs, Drive and Calendar, which will allow for seamless file sharing across multiple email addresses and devices.
Breanna McKnight, sophomore political science major, said she made the switch early in the summer semester.
“I am very excited about this change because it will make receiving and sending emails so much easier than before,” McKnight said.