Frantic troubleshooting by an overworked staff versus someone else fixing problems smoothly. A sliver of server space per person versus a five-gigabyte chunk. Half a million dollars versus free. That's what colleges are faced with as they decide whether to continue running their own e-mail services or outsource them to a professional service like Google Apps Education Edition or Microsoft Live@edu. This article describes how more than 1,000 colleges have signed up with these two companies because, college administrators say, it makes sense to let professionals take over. After all, colleges are educational institutions, not technology enterprises. With heavyweights like Google and Microsoft offering their already-popular services to colleges for free, the officials figure this is one sweet deal. Many colleges decided to outsource their e-mail after pressure from students who already used Gmail or Hotmail on their own and persuaded administrators to go with one or the other. But not everyone has jumped on the outsourcing bandwagon, and others are looking carefully before they leap. Information-technology administrators worry whether the commercial enterprises will protect students' privacy.