The CITES Express E-mail service is an honor and privilege provided to faculty and students by one of the first universities involved in the development of the Internet.

However, allowing a third party like Microsoft or Yahoo! to handle university e-mail would jeopardize the university’s status even if a few dollars are saved.

As a university student I feel secure writing any type of e-mail to someone else on campus because the only middleman in communication is the university.

When a third party is the middleman, everyone’s privacy would be compromised.

While our students and faculty communicate about our latest research and technology developments, we cannot risk our original ideas to be taken by the eyes of a third party e-mail provider.

The high caliber research at the University of Illinois makes it more valuable to snoop into its communications, which is why internal communications should be accessible only to university people.

Some students forward university e-mail to external providers like Gmail, but CITES is quite capable of providing the same extra storage space and additional functionalities rather than allowing external providers to handle university e-mail.

CITES’s tutorials on checking e-mail with clients like Mozilla Thunderbird are particularly useful and could be made more visible to students.

Seeing the incredibly resourceful Web Services Toolbox created for the university, by the university, there’s no doubt that a better, accessible Web browser e-mail interface could be developed for and by the university.

CITES provides a nearly endless list of services to the people at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

It would be a shame to trim off the fundamental and requisite responsibility of handling e-mail from the department.

Not only would there be a loss of privacy, but there would also be a possible loss of patents and original research to competing institutions.