Thousands of colleges and universities looking to save money have abandoned homegrown email services and switched to outside companies like Microsoft and Google, permitting students to keep their personal email addresses and increase inbox space.

Google Apps for Education and Microsoft Live@edu are newly popular email services that allow universities to give students, staff and faculty a school email address with Gmail and Microsoft domains and’ a significantly larger amount of memory space than what most university owned servers provide.

Arizona State University, one of the first universities to adopt the Google Apps for education program in Oct. 2006, jumped at the opportunity to provide their students with a more comprehensive email service and save the school more than $.5 million dollars, University Technology Office Assistant Vice President Kari Barlow said.

‘ASU eliminated their home grown student email system because the Google offering provided increased functionality, superior stability and generous storage space for free,’ Barlow said in an email.

Following ASU’s lead, Northwestern University outsourced its email provider last February, Northwestern Technology Support Services Director Wendy Woodward said.

‘Students have dramatically improved email, calendar and other collaboration services,’ Woodward said in an email. ‘Student services are accessible through websites, as they were before our Google Apps launch.”

In addition to providing a complete switch for colleges, Google and Microsoft are also offering systems that are custom designed,’ according to university specifications.

In October, students at Ball State University in Indiana could choose to switch to a new email provider and keep their ‘@bsu.edu’ email address and configure it to either Google Apps or Microsoft Exchange Lab. However, incoming students will no longer receive an account on BSU’s system, and will instead be required to set an ‘@bsu.edu’ address to an existing email account.

BSU Information Security and Server Support Assistant Director Loren Malm said the university offers a thorough medium between the new systems and the university-owned service.

‘When a student comes to Ball State, we assign them a default email account and they have the opportunity to add additional alias accounts. We have exchange labs where a student can set up a forward to a Ball State email address,’ he said.

‘With the new system, I could configure Google apps to make all my mail appear as if it is coming from the default Ball State account,’ Malm said.

Boston College is the latest school to get rid of its college email-account, though it does not have specific agreements with any ISP, according to a Nov. 19, Chronicle of Higher Education article.

Boston University is not thinking of eliminating its email service, Office of Information Technology Director of consulting services James Stone said.

‘We have looked at it and if it happens it would be for all kinds of different reasons,’ he said. ‘Way less than half of students forward their email to outside accounts.’