“A special thanks to Jay Maris, for circumventing there entire email-security by forwarding all your emails to your gmail account.”

Gabriel’s comment above brings up some good points, too, and I wanted to note that these are also being hashed out by the CWRU user community. Which is important, I think, in two ways: because the community has an opinion, first of all, on privacy concerns as well as usage concerns; also, because the community has a number of places to air these concerns. The most responsible part of Google Apps’ implementation at Case is that the ITS department set up a Wiki for discussion and encourage commentary, as well as being clear about “beta” status. The concerns about corporate interests are real (you go to Google sites, after all, with Google favicons and Google domains), and I think it’s down to university IT departments to help initiate discussion about such concerns as part of the implementation. And not just among power users.

The other reason I still use my college’s email by default is for the stamp of respectability given by a .ac.uk domain (equivalent of your .edu). Seeing a hotmail, googlemail, msn, vel sim. domain doesn’t tell you anything about the sender. I presume these “outsourcing” colleges will keep their domain names, however…