Waterloo Information Systems and Technology Service Desk announced the discontinued use of the ‘@edu.uwaterloo.ca’ domain for students’ emails on Sept. 10. Instead, all email domains will be returned to ‘@uwaterloo.ca’.
This applies not only to students, but UW employees as well.
Why the change? According to an announcement written by Natasha Jennings, a communications officer at IST, the decision “was an outcome of a review of the current email environment that was conducted as part of the project to investigate moving Waterloo employee email to the Office 365 environment.”
The announcement also stated that some of the benefits of having a common email domain include more accessibility to collaborate between students and staff using Office 365 apps, and simplified troubleshooting/support processes and login processes for LEARN, Quest, and Portal, to name a few.
What about emails sent to your current edu.uwaterloo.ca account? “An alias will be created for students with the ‘edu.uwaterloo.ca’ which allows emails sent to this account to be forwarded to their new ‘@uwaterloo.ca’ account,” stated Jennings announcement.
However, the alias will only be running until April 2022. After that, emails will be sent/received strictly from the ‘@uwaterloo.ca’ domain. The students of Waterloo are not too enthusiastic about the changes. “It sucks. Every time I’ve used my student email, it’s been with ‘edu.’
And for a while, many things didn’t even work when I just had ‘@uwaterloo.ca.’ It makes me wonder why they changed it in the first place,” states Abdullah, a third year student.
On the other hand, there are students like Kalpak, a thrid year, who said, “I’m indifferent to be honest. It’s just another day of swapping from old to new, and back.”
“It sounds annoying, but I don’t really care,” Andrew, a fourth year, said.
Jennings’ announcement said the change-over is “tentatively scheduled to take place in April 2020.”
