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UNIT SIX TEXT ONE Maintaining internal E-mail systems has long been the bane of the university information-technology director. Servers are unwieldy and unreliable, and in the past several years, the number of student complaints has grown exponentially as forward-moving providers like YahooMail, Hotmail, and Gmail have increased expectations of what E-mail should offer. The solution for a number of colleges has been to wave the white flag and outsource E-mail hosting to the experts. Microsoft, which owns Hotmail, and Google (Gmail) are the biggest players in the educational E-mail hosting market. Along with the neat-o peripheral gizmos like messaging, calendars, and collaboration tools, the outsourced systems are more stable, have better spam filters, and provide much more storage space than the typical universitys in-house system. At the University of Pennsylvania, its old E-mail service gave students 60 megabytes of storage, just 3 percent of the 2 gigabytes Windows Live now provides. In return, Google and Microsoft get almost nothing, at least monetarily and in the short term. Microsofts Windows Live @ edu and the Google Apps Education Edition are free of charge for schools. Eliminating another source of revenue, the two tech giants stripped their respective services of advertising in an effort to accommodate educators concerns. Microsoft breaks even on the venture (it does run ads on non-E-mail services like instant messaging), while Google, which makes almost all its money through advertising, runs at a loss. But what money they dont make at the moment will—the companies hope—pay great dividends in the form of lifelong users in the future, says Googles Jeff Kelter. As quickly as they shuffle out of commencement, graduates see their E-mail transition to the traditional ad-based formats of Gmail and Hotmail. And unlike before, when universities couldnt afford to host thousands of alumni, Google and Microsoft can maintain every account indefinitely, retaining