So as many of you already know through reading the Sun or word of mouth, Cornell WebMail has now been skinned with Gmail to form Cmail. Curious, I decided to take it for a spin and try it out.

Once I had set up the account, the resulting page looked a lot like my iGoogle home page, only with a giant banner on the top of the page reminding me that I’m looking at a Cornell-run page instead of my own.

Certainly this is a general improvement over the fiasco that is Cornell’s own server (remember when course enroll started and the server went down several times?), but it’s not perfect, and I’ll tell you why:

Cornell Information Technologies is in the midst of an overhaul of the University e-mail system that will increase storage quotas, speed and amenities for students and faculty. The project, called Ensemble, will enable faculty and staff to use such programs as Microsoft Outlook and Entourage. Students’ e-mails will be provided through third-party vendors.

“We’re talking with Google and Microsoft, but we don’t have contracts yet,” Ricky MacDonald ’71, director of systems and operations for CIT, said of the student e-mail accounts. “Our intention is that all students will be provided with accounts on both services. We would like students to have the option to use either.”