With a bill titled “Thousands of Students Need Forward No Longer,” the Government of the Student Body plans to vote on a new e-mail system at Wednesday’s meeting.

The new system will replace the current WebMail system.

GSB created the ITS Email Purchasing Process Committee in September to aid in the e-mail replacement process. The committee has since decided on two e-mail providers deemed most suitable for ISU student usage: Gmail and Windows Live.

Maggie Luttrell, GSB vice-president and senior in history, said she has received a lot of student feedback regarding e-mail replacement. She said a large majority of students who have contacted her have expressed an interest in choosing Gmail as the new e-mail provider.

Students have also expressed dissatisfaction with the current WebMail system. Chelsea Sackett, senior in chemical engineering, said WebMail is “hard to look for old e-mails, because you have to go through pages and pages.”

Sackett also said she would prefer the new service to be Gmail because she “already uses it.”

The ITS Email Purchasing Process Committee, which includes student members from GSB, has held meetings with each of the e-mail providers in order to learn more about each service.

David Popelka, associate CIO of the Iowa State Information Technology Services, said in meetings with the three companies the committee asked questions regarding the features, mailbox size and what the privacy policies are for each provider.

Popelka said the current WebMail system was written by Iowa State University and does not include the features a corporate e-mail provider offers.

“Vendors are providing feature rich tools at no cost. It doesn’t make sense to write our own program,” Popelka said.

He said switching to a new service will save the IT department from “a lot of labor” because the new system will be monitored by a separate company.

Popelka said the switch from WebMail to another service would be relatively simple. The IT department would need to send student’s net IDs to the new e-mail provider.

In addition, Popelka said each company would be able to transfer students’ existing files, such as old e-mails, to the new service. However, this issue is still in its preliminary stages and no process has been created to ensure stored e-mails would be transferred, though this will be possible upon request.

“We can accommodate whichever company students choose,” Popelka said. “The IT department would be comfortable with the decision students make.”

Legal matters regarding security of the new system would need to be addressed to ensure “privacy is maintained,” Popelka said.

He said once a decision has been made, the service would be functional in about a month or two.

Rick Hanton, GSB director of Information Technology and senior in aerospace engineering, said the switch from WebMail to a different provider should be a reasonably smooth process. The only issue with a new provider, Hanton said, is students would not be able to use their Iowa State e-mail address after graduation. Any new system chosen will only accommodate students enrolled at Iowa State.