Ben Horowitz
Equinox Staff
Come Jan. 31, every email address ending in @ksc.mailcruiser.com will no longer exist; instead, they will be replaced by the domain @ksc.keene.edu.
Students may access either email account until Jan. 31,, and all emails sent to the new domain will be forwarded to the original one. The new address features a 1GB quota for email storage, and allows for all incoming email to be forwarded to a personal email account like Yahoo or Hotmail.
The switch in email addresses was a result of students not being able to benefit from college student discounts offered by companies online, which required an email address that ended with .edu; an issue made evident to faculty via complaint emails, The Equinox articles, students employed in the IT department, and student representative bodies.
Laura Seraichick, chief information officer at Keene State College, said, “Students have been asking us to make the change for a while, and the right technology has finally surfaced allowing us to do so.”
According to Seraichick, the changes took a few weeks, about 40 hours of staff effort, and cost the school $1,000. Appropriate alterations had to be made to the data center, which consists of about 100 different information systems on campus, and quite a few more off campus. These information systems house data such as student information, housing management, and the blackboard software. Each relevant system had to reflect the email change, so modifications were made accordingly
“It was real frustrating not being able to take advantage of deals on websites,” junior Richard Welch said, “I missed out on a lot of money-saving so I really welcome the change.”
Students are reacting well to the change. Christine Smigel, senior, said, “The switch to the other email is great, my old inbox used to fill up so fast and now I don’t have to worry about that anymore. Plus, the @ksc.keene.edu email sounds much more professional and academic, people used to ask me ‘what is mailcruiser.com?’”
Many students, though, have wondered why they cannot have the @keene.edu domain, the one used by the faculty and staff on campus. This is because the faculty and staff email domain was already established for on-campus message exchanging nine years ago when the college moved to MyKSC as its portal and email.
Students having an “.edu” as a domain name was not an option at the time.
Now, while it is not impossible to make the change, the amount of resources and time that would be needed to make the switch would take too long.
0Also, keeping as much of the old domain as possible was seen as a benefit, so just the “.com” was changed.
Future projects that are brewing in the Technology department include campus-wide wireless access, making Wi-Fi available in all classrooms, residence halls, administrative areas and even the quad.
Office365 is also being investigated as a potential replacement for email communication. Office365 allows students, teachers, and staff to work together in real time on assignments, share information, view and edit documents in a browser. Email is cloud based, with 25GB of space per user.
Ben Horowitz can be contacted at
bhorowitz@keene-equinox.com.