For many Iowa State students registered to Vincent accounts, electronic mail is a convenient link to family at home, old friends from high school and college professors.

Yet for a few ISU students, Vincent email accounts are providing a necessary connection to their families overseas.

“I would die without my [email account],” Beth Lytle, a sophomore in animal science, said.

Lytle’s parents and two younger sisters have been living in Durban, South Africa, for the past two-and-a-half years.

Email provides Lytle’s primary connection to her family.

She writes her mother at least every other day, she said.

In fact, Lytle said she communicates with her family more now via email than when she lived with them.

“My mom probably tells me more stuff that’s going on now,” she said.

High long-distance telephone rates keep Lytle from calling her parents often.

She calls her parents on the telephone approximately once a month, she said. Since calling South Africa costs about $1.50 per minute, emailing is much more cost-efficient.

However, Lytle admitted there are downfalls to only communicating via email.

“Exclamation points can only say so much,” Lytle said.

She said she misses hearing their voices since voices can express emotions better than words.

Amanda Stember, a junior in exercise science, agrees with Lytle about the somewhat impersonal nature of email.

“I feel like I miss out on emotions,” she said.

Stember’s sister, brother-in-law, two nieces and nephew are currently living in Senim, Kazakstan. Stember said her main method of communication with her family is email, because phone costs are about $2 per minute.

“Because of email I can talk [to them] whenever I want to,” Stember said, adding she communicates electronically with her family three or four times a week.

Stember said her parents gave her sister and brother-in-law a computer and scanner for Christmas before they left for Kazakstan. The gifts were specifically for the purpose of communicating with them via email and sending and receiving pictures.

Like Lytle, Stember said she communicates with her family more now than when they were living closer to her. “I took them for granted when they were living here in Ames,” she said.

While Stember was quick to state her thankfulness for the technology of email, she said it does have downfalls.

Besides the inability to express emotions, Stember said communicating via computer has led to a number of miscommunications with her sister, in which she has taken some of her sister’s statements the wrong way.

Stember said she misses being able to respond to her family immediately.

The Kazak government, she said, also limits the length of her family’s out-going mail.

According to the Iowa State Telecommunications office, approximately 29,000 ISU students and people affiliated with the university are connected to a Vincent account.