Baruch College provides the option of e-mail through the Internet to all of its students. Approximately 4,600 students have taken advantage of this opportunity, first offered in the Fall 1996 semester.

With a one-time visit to the Baruch College WWW home page, either from dedicated PC at Baruch or from home via the Internet, students can apply for e-mail accounts using their student identification number and PIN from the Baruch student system (BOSS) for verification. The accounts are activated within 24 hours, after which the students visit the Baruch Computing &Technology Center (BCTC) with a diskette to obtain a copy of Eudora Light, a popular e-mail package. A program written at BCTC helps students configure their Eudora client for use at Baruch.

To use their e-mail accounts, students insert their diskette into any of the BCTC work stations and open Eudora which uses POP technology to connect to Baruch's e-mail server. To ensure privacy, e-mail is downloaded directly to the student's diskette. where it may be stored for future access. Eudora Light has reply and address book facilities and it incorporates MIME, which permits the sending and receiving via e-mail of non-text files, such as spread sheets.

Each new semester, a utility will be run to identify exisiting e-mail accounts for students who are no longer registered at Baruch, and to load information on newly registered students. This utility will thus keep the database of e-mail account information accurate and up-to-date. Advantages are numerous. The entire process is automated and is under the control of the student; requirements for administration of the system are kept to a minimum. Likewise, institutional disk space requirements are minimal (currently, approximately 8 gigabytes are dedicated for storage of unread mail)

Although using diskettes to store e-mail can pose some limitations, the versatility of portable e-mail may be seen as a benefit to the CUNY student on the go!