Currently the email accounts for students at the queens university are only available via exchange server access, which currently only works correctly for Windows machines. For instance, the phD students at SARC are all issued iMacs and thus are forced to access their emails through webmail.
This situation is completely unacceptable, the university's IT department is forcing a proprietary system of Microsoft on the students. Students which use operating systems not made by Microsoft are at disavantage.
Furthermore email protocols such as POP, IMAP and SMTP are well established and form the backbone of the internet e-mail for many years. It is completely unacceptable that in a University, where productivity is important, that students are forced to use a web interface which has reduced functionality and does not integrate with other programs and notification systems.
We demand access to the Queen's University Belfast email accounts via open and non-proprietary protocols such as POP or IMAP.