I've gone to two public universities in South Dakota, Dakota State in Madison and the School of Mines & Technology now in Rapid City. We used a web-based MS Outlook client for our email system, and it was horrible. The interface just wasn't intuitive, it was slow, and just generally a pain in the ass. We use Google at the School of Mines and it's lightyears ahead. I mean, Gmail is most everyone's favorite webmail client for a reason.