<p>Has anyone logged into their BC email account yet?</p>
<p>They don’t become active until May 7th. Until that time everything is forwarded to your normal account.</p>
<p>I heard BC wasn’t giving new students email addresses starting this year >:[</p>
<p>[Wired</a> Campus: Boston College Will Stop Offering New Students E-Mail Accounts - Chronicle.com](<a href=“http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/3473/boston-college-to-stop-offering-student-e-mail-accounts-to-freshmen-starting-next-year]Wired”>http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/3473/boston-college-to-stop-offering-student-e-mail-accounts-to-freshmen-starting-next-year)</p>
<p>I did not know about that sail640. Thanks for enlightening us all. Now to be honest, I don’t really like the BC’s email account. The mail you receive does not get filtered, the mail that you delete go into the trash which is held there until you delete the mail. In the end, I’d much rather use yahoo or gmail.</p>
<p>Sail640-- I just enrolled yesterday after paying my enrollment fee and they already assigned me an email address. So, not sure if that’s true.</p>
<p>That is definitely not true because the orientation materials give you your BC address and all of the details on how to set it up. Weird that they would say that though…</p>
<p>^ No, actually they assigned me one too, but I can’t log in now.I think it will be activated after the orientation.</p>
<p>I think this is the deal…everyone will have a <a href=“mailto:johnsmith@bc.edu”>johnsmith@bc.edu</a>, but it will just be forwarded to your regular email address that you have used all along.</p>
<p>Sail640, so we’ll all have one but it won’t even be used? or do you just mean it won’t be used until after orientation?</p>
<p>no, it’ll be used but there won’t be a page you log onto in order to access your bc email. instead it’ll just get forwarded to your regular email address. so like you’ll have that @bc.edu one but you’ll somehow need to give the address you check regularly so that bc email can just be forwarded there.</p>
<p>Yeah, Sail640 is right. There is a tab in Agora called “Create/Update Email Address” and whatever email address is in there is what your mail will be forwarded to. It’s just so BC doesn’t have to provide or maintain storage/servers for email accounts that don’t get used often (by most). So if someone sends an email to <a href=“mailto:yourname@bc.edu”>yourname@bc.edu</a>, it’ll just get sent to whatever email account you have set in Agora. I don’t know if this is temporary and that we will actually get a real email account in the near future or if it will stay as-is.</p>
<p>Dear Sail640 and Leahy : If this is all true, there are NUMEROUS reasons why this is an exceptionally bad idea and a risky one for the student body. Details as follows :</p>
<p>[1] Emergency Notifications - Using the BC Network ad BC E-Mail system allows the school to monitor the delivery of emergency notifications to all students across the campus, not just upper classmen still on the BC system.</p>
<p>[2] Classwork Notifications - Professors will often send assignments over e-mail systems and now, the delivery of that educational information will be subject to the service parameters of the provider on which your reflected e-mail address is registered. Guaranteed delivery is not and outages are not maintained in concert with the Boston College calendar.</p>
<p>[3] Confidentiality - This discussion centers around the fact that data could contain university specific and confidential information. Deploying that information onto an outside network makes that information discoverable by search.</p>
<p>[4] Changing Providers - Note that the student will need to update the BC distribution servers in case a new e-mail address is required. Missing such an event could lead to major issues with academic lessons being missed.</p>
<p>[5] Spam Filters - If your service provider should screen for SPAM, it is possible by the terms of service that a BC supplied e-mail might never actually reach your designated in-box.</p>
<p>In essence, this seems to be a cost cutting move on infrastructure (storage) by leveraging other providers (g-mail) and shifting costs. Honestly, wait until the first bit of university research is uncovered on a public network … we will see the value in this new policy.</p>
<p>Well the thing is people are more likely to check their regular email accounts more often than their school email accounts, and I don’t see how the emergency notifications would be any different with this. The email would still be sent to the student’s @bc.edu email and would enter their inbox just just it would if they had a school email and if the mail failed to deliver, BC would receive a general delivery failure notification (like if the email was sent to an account that didn’t exist). Spam filters may just be a nuisance, but all it really takes it telling the spam filter that anything coming from a @bc.edu is okay then you’re set – anyways, if you use a provider like Gmail, the spam filter is surprisingly smart and rarely do emails that are not spam get sent to the spam folder. I don’t see how confidentiality is an issue either. All the emails are encrypted just like they normally are and they are forwarded to a private, secure, and personal email account that you have set up – which means that no one is going to see them unless you provide another person with your password. Changing the account that your email is forwarded to is extremely easy and only takes a few clicks in Agora to complete – but how many times does a person change the email address that they use all the time?</p>
<p>I don’t think that it’s that big of a deal, and they may just end up giving us regular email accounts instead of forwarding mail – who knows? I guess it really depends on how much they save by not having to provide the extra storage and maintenance on the mail servers; however, with the economy the way it is, I wouldn’t be surprised if they tried to cut some extra costs here and there.</p>
<p>I just received this as part of an orientation email:</p>
<p>“Your new BC email account is active as of Saturday, May 9. Your account will be your username directly followed by @bc.edu (for example, <a href=“mailto:username@bc.edu”>username@bc.edu</a>). You should begin to use this account on a regular basis as it will be the primary way the University will contact you. Your email account is accessible through agora.bc.edu. Please note that if you previously forwarded your BC email account, you will need to re-forward it after May 9 or simply begin using your Boston College email account (recommended)” </p>
<p>Looks like we’re getting email accounts.</p>
<p>Yeah we defiantly are, and it seems they are at least partially active already!
i paid my confirmation feed and decided i would try a message few my possible <a href="mailto:@BC.edu">@BC.edu</a> emails. The one i sent to (last name)@BC.edu forwarded to my main account.
But i still don’t know how to send messages from my bc address or if there is another way to check it.<br>
=P</p>