The Campus E-mail Committee is launching a survey next week to determine the features that people need in a future e-mail service for the Davis campus.

E-mail messages announcing the survey are set to go out on Monday, March 7, to all faculty and staff and a representative sampling of undergraduate and graduate students — some 20,000 to 23,000 people altogether.

The messages will include the link to the online survey. UC Davis’ Student Affairs Research Institute prepared the survey and will help analyze the results.

The people organizing the survey described it as nontechnical, and said it will take three to five minutes to complete. The deadline is March 28.

The Academic Senate and Information and Educational Technology formed the ad-hoc Campus E-mail Committee in November, to chart a strategy for central campus e-mail service for faculty, staff and students.

“Your suggestions … will help us ensure the committee recommends an informed and forward-looking strategy for UC Davis,” the committee chair, computer science professor Felix Wu, wrote for the e-mail message announcing the survey.

One question asks people how satisfied they are with the e-mail service they use now. Other areas address the use of mobile devices to access e-mail and calendars, privacy considerations, the size of campus mailboxes, and alternate methods of hosting campus e-mail services.

The Campus E-mail Committee, led by faculty, is building on work accomplished by other committees in 2009-10 to enhance e-mail service for faculty and staff.

Faculty and staff with central campus e-mail service are now using Geckomail, powered by Cyrus software and the uConnect Microsoft Exchange service. Students use DavisMail, which runs on Google’s Gmail. In addition, IET has counted nearly 100 other e-mail systems around the Davis campus.

The e-mail committee plans to submit its recommendations, including a summary of the survey results, by the end of April, to Professor Bob Powell, chair of the Davis Division of the Academic Senate, and Pete Siegel, IET vice provost and the campus’s chief information officer.

More information about the committee’s work is available online. The committee’s e-mail address is emailcommittee@ucdavis.edu.