University Migrating Students to Windows Live Mail?

An anonymous reader wonders: "My University has begun a migration of student email services to Windows Live Mail. All students will be forced onto the system by the end of the semester, but it doesn't support POP or IMAP. Because of that limitation, the only freely available mail client it supports is Windows Live Desktop, which is only available on Windows and I'm worried its ads might be vulnerable to malware just like the ones in Live Messenger. I depend on my mail client and I am concerned about this, because we're not allowed to forward our mail but are responsible for information received there from the University and classes, I'm not on a Windows machine, and I don't have the time to regularly check for web-mail, during the day." What are the pros and cons of such a move for a mid-sized or large college? If you were in charge of the communications of a such a university, would you outsource [please note the vendor neutrality, here] your e-mail? Has anyone else's tech department migrated to Windows Live Mail? Why did they make that decision, and how did it work out for the students? For those of us who have already switched our accounts with no way to revert, what ways exist to get around the lack of POP and still use a client? Is there any hope we can get the University to change back or Microsoft to implement POP before the semester's end? How does your University manage their email?"

Comments

Contact them

[Nightspirit]

The program is still in beta (why the university is going with a beta product I have no idea).
Use this form to contact them and tell them what you want (pop, imap support, or whatever).
http://feedback.msn.com/eform.aspx?productkey=mail beta&locale=en-us

Re:Contact them

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft is fully aware that any modern email server should support POP and IMAP. But you have to be ignorant of Microsoft's business practices to not see what the facts show -- the program (meant in a general sense) here makes it so one's email is held captive in a Microsoft-only format. Not just your data is captive -- in order to view your data you also have to use a computer running Windows. This is also known as, why the fuck did the United States not complete its prosecution of Microsoft and prevent these illegal business practices. Notice the last: you cannot forward your email. You cannot forward your email. Microsoft does the exact same thing on their Exchange email server -- no email forwarding allowed. But then, you have to know that Microsoft makes its money by charging a tiered price for the amount of data in each account. You won't end up with a lot of data in your account if you forward your email. So, guess what, with Microsoft you do not get to.

You also won't end up locked in.

The correct answer to the student's questions is to go to a different school. Its institution's staff IT people are obviously incompetent or getting kickbacks if they are going with this "solution" that, like Windows Vista (makes XP look like a dream), gets in your way. Microsoft's products are become a severe hinderance to productivity.

Re:Contact them

[lukas84]

Exchange can forward email just fine. The Out-of-the-Box config allows this. Outside the organization.

You can also define externals contacts. You can install connectors to view Calendars from Notes Organizations, etc. pp.

Step spewing nonsense.

Re:Contact them

[x_MeRLiN_x]

Quite why he's worried about being served malware when in the very same sentence he said he doesn't use an OS capable of running the program in question is anybody's guess, but my main point is that the Slashdot story he links to states that the banner ads pointed to malware, not that Windows Live Messeneger permitted a third party install any unwanted software. Does anyone (technically aware) really click these types of advertisements? I sure don't.

Re:Contact them

[coyotecult]

I, personally, am not worried about being served malware by any of these programs, seeing as how my operating system isn't even supported except through the webmail client. But other people in the university, not all of them technically aware, will be.

Re:Contact them

[coyotecult]

Notice the last: you cannot forward your email. You cannot forward your email.

I should note that this policy is not Microsoft's fault, or at least their lack of it wouldn't have affected the choice anyway, because our email policy made in 2003 decided that too many people were missing important University emails when they forwarded because of spam filters and outages out of the University's control. Therefore, students can't forward their email. I can understand that, but it adds a layer onto our problems, because we can't set up our own email accounts and simply have our mail forwarded. (Although this change does break the policy a little--it also stated that a student's email will not change during their student career, which some people are unhappy with, but I don't think that's a huge issue because all email to their old account will be forwarded to the new one.)

Re:Contact them

[Anonymous Coward]

The advise to go to a different university is only good if we know what university or universities are using this system. I heard from a friend at University of Idaho that they had changed to windows live mail this semester. Considering the timing the original poster may also be a UI student but given the number of universities across the country it isn't a high probability. Thankfully I am a student as WSU, our campuses are close but I'm not stuck in Idaho and I'm not stuck with windows live mail either.

Re:Contact them

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course you can forward email into your Exchange account. Other email servers all provide for this. But what I said was forwarding email going to an Exchange account to another, non-Exchange account. Setting up a rule, as Microsoft suggests, does not do this. Vital pieces of information about your emails are lost if you rely on this "out-of-the-box" configuration. It is, like most Microsoft products these days, defective by design.

Who the fuck cares if I can set up external contacts? I am sick of paying Microsoft a monthly fee just for the pleasure of using their software. Blech.

You might want to read up on Microsoft's business practices before you continue defending them.

Re:Contact them

[McFortner]

1) E-mail.
2) ???
3) Profit!

Re:Contact them

[Ash Vince]

.... why the fuck did the United States not complete its prosecution of Microsoft and prevent these illegal business practices.

Because the US population elected the republicans, the friends of business and corruption. They could hardly go on prosecuting a company for a few minor attempts at making too much profit when they were about start a religous crusade so the oil companies (owned by the president and his chums) could do the same thing.

Go on moderate this as a troll, but it is not. There are a great deal of people in the rest of the world who are becoming shit scared of the US and its vast military and I am one of them.

Re:Contact them

[itwerx]

what I said was forwarding email going to an Exchange account to another, non-Exchange account

And the GP's reply was correct. Whomever thinks Exchange cannot forward email to an external (non-Exchange) server just doesn't know anything about Exchange, (or how to use Google or the MS-KB either!).
      Not that I'm advocating using Exchange mind you, I still think it sucks/blows majorly for a whole host of reasons, but the above sorts of statements are just painfully ignorant.

Re:Contact them

[Anonymous Coward]

There are a great deal of people in the rest of the world who are becoming shit scared of the US and its vast military and I am one of them.

Gee I live in the US and I am scared of the current administration. Curently the land where rights of citizens do not matter... (The terrorists might kill us - if you don't give up your rights! To which I say LIVE FREE OR DIE.)

so I trolled - sorry but

Re:Contact them

[billsoxs]

Gee two different braches of my university have been hit in the last three months. All of it on Windows machines. My department had over 70 machines taken over. Sounds like monoculture is the way to go.

Re:Contact them

[Anonymous Coward]

You are mistaken if you think setting up a rule through your account to "forward" email on an Exchange server is equivalent to forwarding email on any other email server. Have you actually tried this? It does not work the way you think it does.

Perhaps the problem here is you and the gp are using an incorrect definition of forward. Of course, you can "forward" an email message like you would if you received an email and clicked the forward button to send the now-altered email to another address. This is not the definition of forward we are using. And you and the gp should know this, because obviously that is not what the Slashdot article submitter / student with a question about his University unilaterally changing his email meant. Windows Live allows you to do that kind of forwarding too, where the email is changed to appear to come from the receiving account and loses its original dating and other meta-information/original headers. That is not relevant to this discussion (except to correct things).

I wish Microsoft would stop its shoddy business practices.

Re:Contact them

[mrchaotica]

Obviously, he's worried because he'd have to switch to Windows to read his mail. Once he does that, he will be vulnerable.

Personally, if my uni were doing this, I wouldn't stand for it. Although I wouldn't do something as drastic as switching schools, I would absolutely refuse to use that address anymore (whether it's "required" or not), and set it up to auto-reply explaining such to anyone sending mail to it.

Of course, that kind of thing would never happen at my school. Our various IT departments actually "get it" and provide services for Windows, Mac, and assorted *nix. In fact, we're actually improving by switching away from WebCT (proprietary, run by an evil company) to Sakai (Free Software).

Re:Contact them

[Ticklemonster]

Sounds like the same problem we've had with IT heads recently. All Microsoft trained professionals who sat around drinking the cool aid, now we have the messed up-est network ever. Oh yeah, it works exactly as prescribed, whatever that means, but it's as useless as tits on Ru Paul.

Re:Contact them

[Anonymous Coward]

Be afraid, be very afraid. I for one, already want you dead! No, not really, but you are an idiot, totally and completely.

Re:Contact them

[coyotecult]

To be clear: students won't have to switch to Windows to read their mail. They'd have to switch to Windows to have a supported desktop email client. Not quite as severe, but certainly inconvenient. I can't switch to Windows; my department is very Mac-centric and they provide my laptop. I guess if I got a copy of Windows I could install it now that they're Intel based, but it's better for my work when I'm on the system the department and software we use prefers, and I prefer Mac OS X to Windows personally anyway.

Also, while it would be nice to just refuse to use that address, it's simply not practical to practice. Official University information is sent to it, including communication from professors to their classes, and that system won't change. There is no way I know of to set up an auto-reply on the Windows Live Mail system--I checked the options with my throwaway Hotmail. (And some emails are sent by automated systems that won't change, or from lists automatically populated by student email addresses.) While it would be possible to move away from that email for the most part, you would still have to check it; the frequency would depend on the tendencies of your particular classes at the moment to communicate messages through email.

...I do know they run WebCT, but I don't know much about it, though I hear grumbling from those who have to use it now and again.

Re:Contact them

[typan]

externalcontact@domainwithexchange.com > you@yours.com. as in: automatically. as in: client doesn't need to be open (as it would with a rule). it is a basic feature of exchange. and if you don't want to pay the "microsoft tax" for exchange to forward your email then ... don't. use something else.

you either really don't know exchange or you are being childish. it is confusing, either way, because the issue here isn't about exchange it's about live which does not offer the most basic automatic forwarding -- which, as you say, forces you onto their platform either via the desktop client or, ultimately I would suspect, via some activex/msft ajax "feature" that will require a "genuine" version of windows/IE.

microsoft is less interested in winning via innovation and more interested in winning via lock-in. most people in it know this. but pick your points - there certainly are enough of them.

Re:Contact them

[bryan1945]

Ah, what the heck? Have you gone to college? Do you know how hard it can be to get credits transfered, if you can even get accepted at another school? What if this is a really good school for this kid? This isn't changing from yahoo mail to gmail. This may be the most incredibly stupid suggestion I have ever heard here. Change your university because of email? Sure the IT staff may be incompetent or even getting kickbacks, but to go to such drastic measures as leaving your school is pretty much... stupid.

Re:Contact them

[essh10151]

The worst effect of the recent & current political system in the US, in my opinion, is the fact that people can barely communicate about any topic without it stalling into a political shouting match. Look at this site if you want proof.

Busting the possiblities for dialogue between people is a horrid consequence and - ultimatly, it may very well lead to the very things you are afraid of.

But, in all your fears, you don't really realize that you are playing your part - in the same way that Bush is - do you?

Re:Contact them

[essh10151]

They don't have to use windows now - true. But, mate, it's only one IE-specific-will-only-run-on-genuine-windows feature away. Microsoft isn't stupid or shy and when they offer something for free, they have a reason behind it. I personally don't think it's criminal on Microsoft's part; It's that the CIOs who fall for it are negligent.

Re:Contact them

[totally bogus dude]

Another poster did reply to this, but the explanation they gave was a little terse and probably meaningless to someone who doesn't actually use Exchange.

We use Exchange at work, and there's basically two ways to forward mail to another user outside the domain. Firstly, if all you want to do is forward user@exchangedomain.com to user@gmail.com, you can create a contact which has the address user@exchangedomain.com in its list of email addresse (on the E-mail Addresses tab of the contact's properties in Active Directory Users and Computers). Then you set their real SMTP address to user@gmail.com in the Exchange General tab. With this setup, Exchange will accept mail for them using any of the addresses listed in the E-mail Addresses list, and forward it to user@gmail.com.

The second way is if you want to forward email for a user's Active Directory account (i.e. a user object rather than a contact object). In this case, you go to the Exchange General tab, click on the Delivery Options button, and then select another user or contact to forward their mail to. This has to exist in the directory, so to forward it to an external address you still need to create a contact (as above).

Yes, it's a little convoluted but it works fine. However, it's not really end-user accessible. You could of course set up an OU which users can create contacts in, and give them permission to modify their own forwarding options [altRecipient and deliverAndRedirect], and then make a nice pretty GUI around the whole process. It's probably not worth the hassle to most organisations (and likely there's commercial products which provide this functionality for those who need it).

Re:Contact them

[Jeffrey Baker]

Wow, that's a hell of a lot easier than echo joeblow@gmail.com > ~/.forward. I have seen the light! Exchange is glorious!

Re:Contact them

[kishi]

Contact your school's CIO. Explain your problems. Go to the Student Government. Be prepared to explain why they should care. If you have to, run for a Senator position and bitch.

That's exactly what I did. My University was going to implement a number of rather Draconian Microsoft solutions. As the College of Sciences Rep, I got invited to serve on committees that decided these things, including the IT Budget Committee. Later, I served on the search committee for our new CIO. Each candidate that we interviewed got grilled on Open Source.

IT has the end-user in mind. In our case, it was the History Professor, the Business Student, and the departmental admin associate. Computer Science, Math, and Physics decided to go off and play by themselves. If all we're going to do is call IT incompetent and clueless, is it any wonder that they don't take any of our computing requirements into consideration?

Re:Contact them

[mrchaotica]

Also, while it would be nice to just refuse to use that address, it's simply not practical to practice. Official University information is sent to it, including communication from professors to their classes, and that system won't change.

It'll change if enough people protest by refusing to use their accounts! My university gives out official email addresses for official communication, and protesting through "email disobedience" is exactly what I'd do if it tried to pull this kind of shit with me.

...I do know they run WebCT, but I don't know much about it, though I hear grumbling from those who have to use it now and again.

Tell those people to demand a switch to Sakai. It's written by universities for universities -- you can't go wrong with that!

Re:Contact them

[Barryke]

If you use Internet Explorer. Won't work in anything else.

Remember: A lot of colleges use webbased email. No IMAP or POP3 available.

My college uses Exchange: it sucks. We could not forward anything for 2 years. Now its enabled, but won't work with Firefox. Let me end the rage here, cause there are lots of things i dont like about MS Exchange and Hotmail/Windows Live Mail.

Re:Contact them

[dabraun]

This is also known as, why the fuck did the United States not complete its prosecution of Microsoft and prevent these illegal business practices. Notice the last: you cannot forward your email. You cannot forward your email. Microsoft does the exact same thing on their Exchange email server -- no email forwarding allowed.

Hello Troll. The university is telling them not to forward their mail, windows mail certainly does not prevent this (how would mom and pop forward their stupid jokes??). Microsoft is providing webmail without POP and IMAP because their webmail is ad-supported and that's how they've chosen to implement it - like MANY MANY other webmail providers have done as well. Yes, there are some free webmail apps that do allow POP and/or IMAP - so what? This is how they chose to run their free webmail. The university is the one you should be bitching at, there's nothing evil about microsoft providing a free ad-supported webmail system.

As to the comment about Exchange, what are you talking about? Are you taking about the fact that Exchange/Outlook allows people to send mail with "rights management" specifying that forwarding is blocked? Like, oh, 10 mails I have recieved in the last year out of tens of thousands that were marked that way because my employer did not want confidential information forwarded? Way to twist a feature customers asked for into "exchange does not allow mail to be forwarded".

Re:Contact them

[totally bogus dude]

Well, it is easier for our users - they just send an email to the helpdesk. :)

Of course, very few of our accounts are forwarded externally, and that's probably the case for the vast majority of Exchange installations. That's just not its strong point. On the other hand, most other mail systems don't make it especially easy to allow other people to see particular mail folders in your own mailbox, or to share your calendar and contacts with others, and so on.

Re:Contact them

[totally bogus dude]

I'm not sure what you're getting at -- Outlook Web Access (Exchange's webmail) works fine in other browsers. Yes, it is better in Internet Explorer, but it's usable in most other browsers.

I wouldn't like running Exchange for college student mail though. That just sounds weird. It's pretty good for corporate use, but that's a highly controlled environment with tight integration, and students probably need more flexibility.

Mind you, if you're going to be using Outlook anyway, RPC over HTTPS gives you the full Exchange integration from anywhere on the internet, and that beats web mail any day.

Re:Contact them

[malfunct]

Windows live mail works fine in firefox so why worry? Granted its the web interface but at least live mail (hotmail is still an older interface) is a decent ajax interface. In fact, I am looking at g-mail and live mail side by side in firefox (seemed more fair) and live mail looks far less cluttered to me. Searching mail is not difficult in live mail either now that the live search engine is used to do it.

I'm not sure how I feel about a university using live mail with no university sponsered alterative. On one hand it seems wrong from the standpoint of forcing students to live with advertisements in order to do schoolwork. On the other hand live mail (with the exception of not having a pop or imap interface) has better features than any university run mail server I've ever seen. Its also got far more space and no wierd rules (ok my college liked using VAX for e-mail, it was wierd and caused lots of support issues). Finally from the standpoint of the college and the students the mail service is entirely free being completely advertiser funded. It also has the benefit that most of the students likely use hotmail at home (and live mail works sort of like it) so will understand it better. It is also less likely to infect the users machine, a fact I base on knowing how the average student I went to college with protected thier machine from malware. Yes I know that messenger displayed an ad that could infect machines with malware but that is 1 incident in 6 years that I know of and my pop mail account downloads a few infected e-mail files a day. All of them are caught by my anti-virus software but most college students probably do not have anti-virus software even if its provided for free by the school.

Re:Contact them

[Angostura]

The general rule is that any semi-complicated operation mediated through a GUI will appear complex when described textually, but may well be simple to actually carry out. Meanwhile any command line operation will be simple to write down, but often impossible for a neophyte to discover by themselves.

Re:Contact them

[1lus10n]

Of course you can look at gmail via just about any browser on Linux, Mac, your blackberry or palm device, your symbian device, your pocket pc and just about anything else. It has almost no restrictions and has one of the best designed UI's on a webmail program ever.

But windows live works on firefox ... on windows. yipee.

Re:Contact them

[ComputerizedYoga]

I probably shouldn't respond to this sort of thing at all, but ... you've totally missed the point.

By "forward mail" nobody but you means "click the forward button and send the message on to someone else".

They mean "when a message arrives at blah@domain.com, have it automatically end up at whatever@somewhereelse.com. As in forwarding the entire account transparently to another location.

This is an invaluable feature for people with multiple accounts, allowing them to consolidate their mail in a single location, thus making it easier to stay on top of (and to spam-filter).

Re:Contact them

[Antique Geekmeister]

Malware has also been done in UNIX: take a look at the old Morris Worm of 1988. But it's much more rare.

But expect a lot of departments to spin off their email services to something internal, even without the knowledge of the IT department. And expect someone to challenge it on legal grounds concerning the preservation of documents for accounting or grant renewal purposes.

Re:Contact them

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact, we're actually improving by switching away from WebCT (proprietary, run by an evil company) to Sakai (Free Software).

FWIW, Sakai is not free software.

Re:Contact them

[NeilTheStupidHead]

Not only do you need to be running Windows, Microsoft thinks that you should only use Internet Explorer as well (obvious). I managed to crash Firefox the other day and after reporting the error with MS error reporting, I followed the link I was handed. I was sent to this page (paraphrased since I didn't save it):

"This crash was caused by a problem in Mozilla Firefox. This is a known problem, but there is currently no solution. To avoid this problem in the future, we suggest switching to MSIE7."

I was laughing so hard, my headphone fell right off my head.

Re:Contact them

[simscitizen]

WLM beta works just fine in Firefox with all features enabled. It actually works better than in IE, because you can more easily block all the ads.

Re:Contact them

[theblackdeer]

Where does it say the program is in Beta? Everything on that page looks pretty official.

Re:Contact them

[neomunk]

I'm not arguing, but I can't find where the Educational Community License 1.0 fails to qualify as free software, under gnu.org's definition. I mean, it's not on the list, but it's not on the list of licenses that AREN'T free either, it's not been listed at all.

Just trying to see what you mean.

Re:Contact them

[misleb]

Remember: A lot of colleges use webbased email. No IMAP or POP3 available.

Quite often the webemail itself uses IMAP. Like some modified version of squirellmail. Most colleges I've dealt with have IMAP and/or POP available if only because that is what their webmail uses to get your mail.

My college uses Exchange: it sucks.

Not only does it sucks, it is overkill. Think of the cluster of servers required and the swath of unused features. When one server running Postfix/Cyrus would probably do. My guess is that they just happened use use Exchange for staff/faculty and thought it would be easiest just to extend it to students. Have worked in a couple (admittedly small) colleges, I've found it best to keep staff and student systems largely separate. The needs and usage patterns are often quite different.

-matthew

Re:Contact them

[charlesnw]

Indeed. Anti anything rhetoric gets in your way and keeps you from making sound judgements. Look at the facts. Don't spread FUD.

Re:Contact them

[dabraun]

Obviously, Exchange can do that as well - it takes about 30 seconds to create a rule to do that in Outlook (which will be processed by the server and doesn't require Outlook to remain connected to function). Maybe windows live mail can't (I've never used it) but I'm sure there are plenty of free web mail systems that can't do that either. It places the webmail provider in a situation where they are performing work on account of someone who isn't necessarially ever going to their site, which is a pretty lousy situation for a company to be in.

The whole idea of a University outsourcing their email to a free webmail provider sounds rediculous to begin with. GP was trying to twist this into somehow an evil action on Microsoft's part - which I objected to because this has nothing to do with Microsoft.

Re:Contact them

[mrchaotica]

Windows live mail works fine in firefox so why worry?

Without a POP interface I can't back up the mail. Because of that, it's as good as useless. Period.

Re:Contact them

[Barryke]

I'm not sure what you're getting at -- Outlook Web Access (Exchange's webmail) works fine in other browsers. Yes, it is better in Internet Explorer, but it's usable in most other browsers.

I'm talking about forwarding.
Our college uses Microsoft® Office Outlook® Web Access for Exchange Server 2003.

The filter feature (e.g. send a copy of all mails in inbox to foo@bar.com) is not available in Firefox, Mozilla, Safari, or Opera. We've tried.
Exchage does a browserdetect, lots of things in the interface are different.

See the difference for yourself: (i made screenshots)
http://aardappelsap.nl/tmp/ms-exchange-screenshots /

Re:Contact them

[totally bogus dude]

Ah, fair enough. I hadn't even noticed that it exposed the Rules via OWA. Learn something new every day! I hear using those rules for forwarding sucks, anyway.

You missed a ® for Exchange® Server 2003, by the way. :)

Re:Contact them

[Barryke]

Heh i just copy'd & pasted it.
I guess 'Exchange' is not very 'trademarkable', or MS made an error in the Exchange® helpfiles.

Re:Contact them

[Jellybob]

Having found out about the mess Exchange makes of forwarding yesterday, I'm afraid it's just as complicated as it sounds, especially since several steps give you the option of starting unrelated wizards along the way.

yes and no

[oohshiny]

Outsourcing mail makes sense, but outsourcing to a service that doesn't support POP or IMAP doesn't.

Your university might want to consider outsourcing to Google Mail...

Re:yes and no

[numbski]

Does GotMail still work? If so, use that. Just make sure to cron it so it runs in the background and you're not having to constantly wait for the process to complete.

Re:yes and no

[Rinisari]

Utilize the school's student newspaper. Write a letter to the editor, if not a guest editorial. Most editors are cool and will let you write the editorial, as long as you keep it constructive and cite specific examples and sources while keeping it professional and logical. Another option is flyering the campus, but that's a little more difficult at a university of 20,000+ than a college of ~1,500.

Re:yes and no

[Anonymous Coward]

You're forgetting about something, though. Microsoft give huge discounts and tons of free stuff to colleges, therefore the colleges have raging boners for Microsoft.

For example, before I finished my AS degree in programming last year, half of my classes had the word "Microsoft" in the title. When I had office classes, it was exclusively Microsoft Office. When I had C and C++ classes, it was required to use Visual Studio .NET (the solution file was required). I had to have Visual Basic and C#. The database design classes required Microsoft SQL Server. The web classes required the use of Microsoft Frontpage (I got points taken off an assignment for doing it by hand, even though it validated 100% as XHTML 1.0 strict and 100% CSS2 and rendered exactly as it was supposed to). The website we had to upload the homework to only worked with IE6. The only class I had that wasn't Microsoft-centric was Java, but they made sure to make it seem bad by comparison. Notepad was the only editor we were allowed to use in class, had to use the command line (I love the UNIX command line, but can barely tolerate the DOS/NT command line), only wrote command line programs, etc.

As a student, I got free licenses for Office 2003, XP Professional, Visual Studio .NET 2005, SQL Server, Frontpage, Project, Visio, and others. This ensures that students are only exposed to and only know Microsoft products.

Microsoft is probably offering the use of Windows Live Mail for free (or very cheap) so that students will think that Microsoft == Email.

Re:yes and no

[Sorthum]

I do work as a mail admin for a university.

Our boss dismissed the idea of outsourcing to Google or anybody else based SOLELY upon the fact that they reserved the right to advertise in the future to our students. We don't view our students as a commodity to be sold, so that kinda killed the whole "outsource the email" idea.

Re:yes and no

[coyotecult]

We have been writing letters and commenting on their news article about it. We also have flyers up so that people can print out their own and post them on bulletin boards, and have done posting ourselves as well. I'll get in touch with my colleagues and see if anyone's contacted the paper's editors on doing another story that talks about the other side of the migration, as well.

Re:yes and no

[coyotecult]

Do you know whether Windows Live Mail reserves that right? Part of the reason WLM was chosen over Google Apps at the time was because of the advertising. However, it was not the only reason. (I don't know whether Google actually told them that or whether they were just gleaning things from the website.)

Re:yes and no

[Assassin bug]

We don't view our students as a commodity to be sold

Your university must not be a Land Grant university.

Re:yes and no

[binner1]

As a mail admin at a Canadian university, we're hesitant to go with any of these services. The fact that the data would live on servers in the US run by US companies and subject to their laws kinda leaves a sour taste in our mouths...especially post September 11. That hasn't stopped other Canadian universites from going with Campus GMail.

-Ben

Re:yes and no

[billsoxs]

Point them at this

http://www.utdallas.edu/datacompromise/

and this

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12459840/

and I think that one more campus just got hit. Not sure which one.

Re:yes and no

[coyotecult]

I'm not sure what that would do; I'm looking at this and I don't see a relation of the security breach to outsourcing of the email.

Re:yes and no

[richwillal]

With the recent release of Google Apps, if they condisdered Google as an alternative they could also provide students with POP access to e-mail, a word processor, a spreadsheet application, a calendar, a customized start page set up by the school that's integrated with the other tools, and Google Talk access with the school e-mail account. I'm not a rep for Google, but considering how badly Google wants to take this area of the market, it would be crazy for any school not to at least consider and compare both alternatives. They even have a special program for schools (http://www.google.com/a/edu/). Good Luck...

Re:yes and no

[Anonymous Coward]

I do work as a mail admin for a university.

Our boss dismissed the idea of outsourcing to Google or anybody else based SOLELY upon the fact that they reserved the right to advertise in the future to our students. We don't view our students as a commodity to be sold, so that kinda killed the whole "outsource the email" idea.

I'm a IT analyst for a major university (though not the mail admin.. thankfully) and our issue with free services is the expectation of privacy. Say we're one step away from curing diabetes at the molecular biology center.. do we really want internal email related to this flowing through a third party server?

Re:yes and no

[misleb]

Your university might want to consider outsourcing to Google Mail...

POP is the very bare minimum. But in the case of Google Mail, it isn't good enough. I have a gmail account and barely ever use the web interface because I prefer Apple Mail. And I like to have all my email aggregated in one interface. Problem with POP (at least with Google) is that once I POP the mail from one machine, another doesn't get it (like work vs. home). Sure, it is still THERE because I have the "leave on server" option selected, but you can only POP it once as far as I can tell. Give me IMAP! I want access to all my folders!

-matthew

Re:yes and no

[milatchi]

We don't view our students That's very good. Most Universities are greed factories not concerned with higher education, but higher profits.

Re:yes and no

[nmos]

Outsourcing mail makes sense

In a University? It sounds like a huge waste of bandwidth to me.

Re:yes and no

[billsoxs]

It is monoculture... Only PCs got hit in each case.

If you are worried about adverts

[Anonymous Coward]

then block them
http://hostsfile.mine.nu/hosts.zip

Uh, complain?

[suso]

Don't waste your time asking about it on Slashdot. You should be writing to the president of your University and make him aware of your concerns. If they don't change, transfer to another college.

Re:Uh, complain?

[maynard]

Uhhh. Why should he bother changing university (and job) over IT email policy? Even if he doesn't like the email service, doesn't run Windows, and won't ever use it - why does that warrant transfer to a new school? Perhaps there are other compelling reasons why he might want to stay. For example, he has a girlfriend there; he has a good relationship with a certain professor who is willing to help his career path; he might lose transfer credits in the process; etc etc etc.

Your suggestion seems a tad excessive, IMO.

Re:Uh, complain?

[rbarreira]

Hey, leave the computer and go take your pills.

Re:Uh, complain?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think he's asking slashdot how to best phrase his concerns to the president of his university.

Re:Uh, complain?

[gnud]

Guys, why is every Ask Slashdot item answered with "dont waste your time on slashdot, instead go bug $some_seemingly_appropriate_person". If that is you attitude, just dont read any "Ask Slashdot" threads. Perhaps he just wants ammunition for his blazing letter to the university board =)

Re:Uh, complain?

[modecx]

Uhhh. Why should he bother changing university (and job) over IT email policy? Even if he doesn't like the email service, doesn't run Windows, and won't ever use it - why does that warrant transfer to a new school?

I would probably think about it if I were in this position, and weren't especially attached to that school, and here's why: an action as poorly thought out as this one is surely not the only silly thing the school has done or will do in the near future. In other words, stupidity is almost positively endemic to the culture of the university, and only it's going to get worse before it gets better... The only way it's going to get better is if customers (students) vote with their money.

Plus, I just wouldn't want my professional reputation to be tied to a university with a habit of making idiotic moves like this, most especially if I were attending for some technology related degree.

Re:Uh, complain?

[aardvarkjoe]

In other words, stupidity is almost positively endemic to the culture of the university...

Stupidity is positively endemic to the culture of any university.

Re:Uh, complain?

[modecx]

Stupidity is positively endemic to the culture of any university.

Well sure, so it is to everything, or at least it seems that way sometimes. I can say that my university experience was mostly devoid of stupidity. How far from the norm my experiences were, I cannot say.

Re:Uh, complain?

[Tyrven]

IAWTC. Also, the proposal of changing universities because of an email policy is ridiculous. That's like telling people who think the United States Postal Service to move outside the United States. If we were all to hold our life to such idealistic standards, we'd have nowhere to go.

Re:Uh, complain?

[WingedEarth]

Actually, we should hold ourselves to idealistic standards, but shouldn't run away from our problems. Fight the University! Confront the administration and campaign to make the University a better place. What a world we'd have if people actually demonstrated this sort of loyalty to their communities, rather than just moving somewhere that already suited them.

Re:Uh, complain?

[yabos]

It's the right idea but it probably won't do anything to stop it. At my university all I have to do to get free microsoft software is ask for it. You can get virtually anything except any server products, for free. Places that are that in bed with MS usually won't change no matter how much you complain. After all, most of their student's won't complain.

Re:Uh, complain?

[coyotecult]

We're doing everything we can to try and make our complaints to all channels, but I was hoping that posting this might help me know about other Universities that are doing the same thing and could give me any advice, and also because the people here are really good at knowing all kinds of ways to get around those restrictions and have POP access, and I figure the more methods I know the better. Hacks really aren't idea, but if they're all we can get, they're what we'll have to take.

Re:Uh, complain?

[Tyrven]

Well, it depends on the situation right? We certainly can't expect any system to change if people aren't willing to at least voice their concerns or, even better, actively push for change. Systems and organizations don't usually change themselves - at least not towards order :). At the same time, if it's considerably less work to discard-and-replace then I'd expect most people to go with the path of least resistance - unless, of course, there is some other variable tying them to the status quo (existing investment, loyalty, a sense of ownership, relationships, etc). Sometimes the best way to push for change is to opt out, withdraw your support. Other times you just don't care enough to fight for change.

But this is getting pretty abstract, isn't it? Certainly my answer differs if we're talking about my video card, my email service, my university, my lover, my neighborhood, my family, my local government or my federal government.

Re:Uh, complain?

[Heir Of The Mess]

You can't be serious. Goddam, people have it so good these days. When I was at uni all our e-mail was on a VMS system and I had to actually go onto the campus site and access it through a VT100 terminal. If I wanted to read my e-mail at home I had take it home on paper after printing it out on a dot matrix line printer that normally had about 2 days worth of jobs queued up ahead of me. With this kind of thing we just put up and shut up. You can't let trivial things make big decisions for you.

Now maybe if they didn't sell my favorite beer in the university bar at breakfast then I might have considered trying to change.

Re:Uh, complain?

[Jason Earl]

He should switch schools because he goes to the University of Idaho. The fact that the school uses Windows Live Mail is just one of the many reasons he should jump ship.

Re:Uh, complain?

[Anonymous Coward]

The same reason why some of us still boycott Amazon over their 1-click patent, ten years later. It's called scruples, and takes precedence over convenience and personal gain. You might want to try it one day. It won't give you a fatter wallet, but will give you a good feeling that money can't buy; you take actions to help make the world a better place in the long run for others, and not just yourself.

Re:Uh, complain?

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

t won't give you a fatter wallet, but will give you a good feeling

I think there's a name for that feeling...something like the "holier-than-thou" attitude?

Re:Uh, complain?

[mazarin5]

What's the point of posting this here when you should be taking it up with suso? Wait... nevermind.

Re:Uh, complain?

[Alex Zepeda]

Ordinarily I'd agree. However, consider that the student is being held responsible for email sent to that account, forwarding is not allowed, and the only Windows Live mail client (supposedly?) is a Windows program. Given those conditions, I'd be damn sure to consider switching to a more rational educational institution.

At the uni I attend, they've switched to Lotus Notes for email. However, they still maintain (in a very half-assed manner) IMP for people who want webmail, and POP3+SSL for people who use their own mail clients.

Re:Uh, complain?

[Howserx]

As an employee of the Alumni Department at a Canadian University I'll add this. I switched universities and it was a huge mistake. I went from being a 3rd year Com Sci student to a student with 127 hours of elective credits. I had to do my final 3 years doing a full course load of core courses just to attempt to graduate (which I didn't). Imagine the burnout of 10 courses per year of Math and Comp Sci. Might sound like a dream until you have 3 programming assignments(COBOL C++, and Mainframe assembly), a numerical analysis paper and whatever else I had to do(this was 10 years ago). So think twice about switching universities. Tell the university admin that as an alumni you will not be donating, helping or giving a positive review of the university. With admission levels rising (at least in Manitoba) a student that leaves will be replaced by another bill paying body. Leverage the alumni department. These people will bend over backwards to make you happy if they think they can get money out of you.

Re:Uh, complain?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think there's a name for that feeling...something like the "holier-than-thou" attitude?

For some folks, it has nothing to do with thou, but thanks for thinking it's all about thou. (Feeling guilty?) It's about a number of things: taking control of one's life and not whining helplessly without doing something about the situation, for one. Some others: holding fast against a bad trend; trying to leave the universe in better shape than you found it in (or, as in this case, as bad actors are trying to make it); or just the sheer fun of sticking it to corporate asshats.

Re:Uh, complain?

[glitch23]

Perhaps there are other compelling reasons why he might want to stay. For example, he has a girlfriend there; he has a good relationship with a certain professor who is willing to help his career path; he might lose transfer credits in the process; etc etc etc.

I believe reasons 1 and 2 are the same thing.

Re:Uh, complain?

[Stephen Samuel]

Uhhh. Why should he bother changing university (and job) over IT email policy? It's a pointer to bad things....

If they're going to a Microsoft-only solution for email, then this university might be (becoming) one of those university that has it's students live in a Microsoft-only environment... (i.e. you only learn MS languages, and MS solutions).

Now, this also depends on what he's studying at this university. If he's studying art or law, this isn't likely to be such a big problem, but if he's studying CS, then this could be a career-limiting problem.

Then, again, there's the problem that if the university is being this short-sighted about email, they're probably making stupid decisions about other issues that would be even more critical to the OP's future.

It's like being offered a lift by somebody with a mickey in his right hand ... he might still be sober, and he might even hold off on finishing the mickey until after I'm safely home, but I'd probably elect to find another way home.

Re:Uh, complain?

[batkiwi]

Why do you consider the move to livemail poorly thought out? Why does the average student need pop/imap access to their student email? LiveMail works great in firefox on linux.

Re:Uh, complain?

[kingturkey]

The average student perhaps doesn't know about pop/imap, but there would be plenty who do, and they don't feel like constantly loading a webpage to check their emails, rather than simply waiting for a popup from a mail client telling them that they have mail. Perhaps they also want the convenience of having all of their mail available offline and immediately, without having to load a page. POP/IMAP is very useful, just because not every student uses it doesn't mean plenty would use it and benefit from it.

Re:Uh, complain?

[dal20402]

Speaking as one of those "average students"...

1. Webmail, of any sort (including gmail), is annoying to use. No matter how sophisticated your javascript/AJAX tricks are, you can't make a webmail interface as sensible or responsive as that of an ordinary desktop mail client.

2. Most of us have university and non-university accounts. If we use webmail, we either have to forward messages from one account to the other (exactly what the OP is complaining he can't do with his harebrained Windows Live setup), or have to check more than one unresponsive, badly designed webmail site, instead of simply looking at all our messages in one desktop email client.

3. Desktop email clients tend to have much larger feature sets than webmail interfaces.

I was recently affected by my school's switch to "MyMail." In theory, the system supports IMAP, but in practice, the IMAP facility is slow and unreliable. Thankfully, the system does allow us to forward email, so my university email goes to my account at fastmail.fm (who are the world's most kick-ass IMAP provider).

IMAP is also much to be preferred over POP. All of us will have to check email from multiple machines at some point (some poster said something about Mom's house at Christmas...) By handling everything on the server side, IMAP makes it possible to look at the same directory structure on the server and in your desktop email client, or to have desktop email clients set up on multiple machines (i.e. my laptop and my big studio rig).

Re:Uh, complain?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would like to ask the original poster if he has a girlfriend.

Re:Uh, complain?

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

For some folks, it has nothing to do with thou, but thanks for thinking it's all about thou. (Feeling guilty?)

No, but thanks for proving my point.

Re:Uh, complain?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm glad nobody judges me like that. Otherwise the last time I goofed at work they would have just fired me, instead of telling me I screwed up and not to do it again. :(

Fortunately for this guy though, I'm pretty sure nobody is judging their new job applicants based on the email provider at the applicant's university.

Re:Uh, complain?

[Anonymous Coward]

At my company, we had Lotus Notes forced upon us, and they maintain the default mail template in a very half-assed manner. It was mandated without IMAP or POP3, and the webmail is only slightly better than the fat client. I had to threaten to leave before they opened IMAP to me only. The rest of IT discovered the Outlook Connector for Notes and installed it on their own. Notes was chosen based on a bunch of lies, and some foil-hat theories about kickbacks from IBM.

Re:Uh, complain?

[Alsee]

Uhhh. Why should he bother changing university (and job) over IT email policy? Even if he doesn't like the email service, doesn't run Windows, and won't ever use it - why does that warrant transfer to a new school?

Perhaps because he doesn't want to give them his money and then be DENIED COURSE CREDIT AND BE DENIED A DEGREE maybe?

You didn't even need to Read The Fine Article. It was right there in the Slashdot blurb: "we're not allowed to forward our mail but are responsible for information received there from the University and classes ". If a teacher sends an email assigning some course work or change in course policy, and he does not receive that email, a failing grade will likely be imposed upon him. If the University sends an email that he must file some form or somesuch, and he does not receive that email, then his student status for the semester may be voided and all of the money he paid be lost for naught.

So YEAH, he absolutely positively needs to either get with the Microsoft Windows mail system, or he needs to transfer to a different school.

-

Which university?

[DoofusOfDeath]

Which university?

Re:Which university?

[Phantom Gremlin]

Which university?

That's the first question. Is it a state secret? Is he in fear for his life?

In a situation like this I don't think the story should even appear on Slashdot if the school is unnamed.

Re:Which university?

[Anonymous Coward]

University of Idaho. https://maila.its.uidaho.edu/

Re:Which university?

[ill_conditioned]

He is talking about the University of Idaho most likely. They are currently migrating students to live, and this same discussion just came up in our LUG discussion group just the other day. Students who oppose the change have been quick to blame the university ITS department, when really this is a product of their student government (ASUI) and the state's yearly budget cuts to the University.

Re:Which university?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just to clarify a bit. We are forced to use a provided University of Idaho Address...which means we are fully stuck with Windows Live now. More about the situation here: http://iwantmypop.com/

Re:Which university?

[aardvarkjoe]

Students who oppose the change have been quick to blame the university ITS department, when really this is a product of their student government (ASUI) and the state's yearly budget cuts to the University.

Well, it certainly is the fault of the IT department that students aren't allowed to either forward their e-mail, or specify an address of their choice for official university communication. Neither one of those cost anything, and would solve these problems.

Re:Which university?

[compgenius3]

You say that niether of these options costs money, but who will maintain the database that contains this forwarding information? I work at the help desk at the University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign and a large portion of the problems we see are with e-mail. While we do maintain our own e-mail services, persons can set their *@uiuc.edu address to forward to any mail, or their more precise *@express.cites.uiuc.edu address can be forwarded, but this is set using a different feature. At any rate, when students graduate they can opt to forward their uiuc.edu address for some time. They have to set this address themselves, but someone has to be there in case entries become corrupted or otherwise messed up. I get paid to fix some of these errors, so the University is spending money to have me there fixing problems with this. Of course I do a lot of other things too, like reset people's passwords but that's another story.

Re:Which university?

[coleridge78]

All of your replies make it obvious that you have no idea how a University (or probably any organization of over ten members) functions. No offense. You may be a frustrated student, which I can understand. I sounded similar once upon a time. Here's the deal: the IT department is *exceedingly* unlikely to be the source of the "can't forward email" policy. I work for one of the five largest Universities in the States. I can tell you that nothing like that would ever come from the IT department. Ever. It would come from people like a VP or Provost who oversees the admissions and/or fundraising process. Why? They want to be able to conduct all business, from admissions/housing/financial aid when you come in, to begging you to become a contributor when you leave, as cheaply as possible. This means e-mail and it means forcing you to use theirs so that you can't say, "oh, Hotmail must've eaten it!" or "You sent it to the wrong address!" You have one address, and you are responsible for it, period. It comes from way over the IT people's heads, and they may even hate it.

Re:Which university?

[Venim]

University of Idaho pssh. who cares about Idaho!?

- someone from post falls, idaho :S

Re:Which university?

[sumdumass]

I wonder if someone could sue this university for any virus or lost informtion that results from the use of windows or windows live if anything ever happens.

It appears that they are being forced to use this on a condition of participating in schoolar activities. It also appears to be a state funded school (at least partialy) and freedom of speach liabilities could arise from having to use windows software.

Maybe the decision process could be backtracked to a piont were someone actualy recieved something for making this switch.

I Know it is bad, but I'm at a point were I'm all for using the courts to stop MS crap from being pushed on me. I suppose other are too. I also know the reasons I said abive might be silly with little to stand on, But worse cases have actualy won. Plus something like this could be just enough pressure to make whatever the payoff is seem less worth it.

Re:Which university?

[LoverOfJoy]

Specifying an address of their choice wouldn't cost any more than specifying a windows live mail address.

Re:Which university?

[dhasenan]

My university uses a Sun server for mail. To set mail forwarding, ssh in and run the forward_mail script (or just edit your .forward file). Took them ten minutes to create the script, ten to write the documentation. UNIX isn't defective by design, but in exchange, you have to take care of the hardware.

I imagine that it'd cost perhaps $5k for a server that'd handle University of Idaho (scaling down from my university's setup). Setting it up for webmail and POP3/IMAP/SMTP access (OpenWebmail, IMP, Hula, Citadel server...) wouldn't take an unreasonable amount of time, and then the only continuing costs would be regular updates and hardware support. I think they're only saving themselves less than $5,000 per year, especially since they could ask the CS department to provide assistance.

Re:Which university?

[Anonymous Coward]

DeVry, I think

Here is the e-mail I got the other day:

NEW DeVry Student e-mail

DeVry University is moving to a new e-mail platform for students. DeVry and Microsoft have joined together to provide students with a free e-mail account that can be used for your student needs. Your current student email:
Example: benjaminfranklin@(censored) is going away.

You need to activate your new account before March 2, 2007.

DeVry University + MSN = New E-Mail

How do you get your account?
As a registered student, you just need to go online to your DeVry portal and activate it. There are handouts available in the SS Hub that tell you how to do that. (campus specific info)

When does this happen?
You will need to setup your new student e-mail before March 2, 2007. At that time, the (censored) e-mail will be shutdown. Any correspondence from DeVry will come to you through your new account after that time. Your new e-mail gives you 1 Gigabyte of storage and allows up to 10 Megabytes of attachments on sent e-mails./blockquote

Re:Which university?

[arth1]

So now, instead of "Hotmail has eaten it!" you are now locked to using an account with strict quotas and the excuse "My mailbox was full!". This will happen often, and your only recourse then is to start deleting e-mail you probably should keep for future reference, but won't be allowed to export. What an improvement.

Re:Which university?

[coleridge78]

I'm not sure if you're referring to the story, with its MS lock-in "solution", or to what I was talking about, which is the reasons for not allowing students to forward mail (or at least discouraging it).

If the former, I agree with you. If you're going to prevent students forwarding mail, you better offer them choice in how they handle it. But if you're talking about the general case as I was you're way off-base.

Not many colleges or universities have particularly low quotas anymore, and exceptionally few bounce mail when you hit such a quota. That's a terrible, moronic policy (I'm sure there are some small state and community schools that haven't gotten the memo yet, but they're the exception). And other than brain-dead joints that use MS or IBM "solutions" I haven't heard of anyplace that prevents a user from exporting and archiving mail on their own (many even offer special facilities for such).

Re:Which university?

[coleridge78]

You're wrong, and completely ignored the substance of his message. I think a drop-in MS "solution" is a terrible, terrible idea, but on the more general question of not allowing students to forward mail it absolutely saves money, for the reasons the gp listed which you completely failed to respond to. It's not the matter of changing the delivery destination. It's the matter of support, documentation, and repercussions.

Re:Which university?

[wildchild07770]

My (former, i'm a graduate since December) university the University of Wisconsin - Parkside recently sent out an email stating they were also migrating from our current (i'm not sure what but it's horrid) email system to live mail. Fortunately for me i've only used the account for mandatory academic correspondence and use gmail for everything else so it doesn't bother me too much, but seemed and odd move since my school typically supported open software.

Re:Which university?

[arth1]

Not many colleges or universities have particularly low quotas anymore, and exceptionally few bounce mail when you hit such a quota.

Any quota is a particularly low quota. If one is set at all, it's with the expectation that it will be hit -- why else set it?

As for bouncing (or worse), that depends on whether the quota is hard or soft, and whether it is set at system level or application level. If on the latter, yes, a system can still accept e-mail, but if the former, the MTA has no other recourse than to bounce. And even if the former, it's worse than worthless unless the user also has the means to export the emails somewhere else.

As a system administrator, I have no way to know whether the 10 GB a certain person received overnight is all important or not. It could very well be. The worth of the data is their domain, not mine. What I can do is make it easy for them to move the data offsite, and recommend that they do so, and also make alternative methods of transfer available. Other than that, add disk space as necessary, and keep the data available to those with the insight to judge its value - the users. Imposing a limit isn't something I can do effectively, as I can't and shouldn't judge whether cousin Anna's pictures from last year are of more value than the thesis material expected to come in by e-mail tomorrow. By enforcing a quota, I make that choice.

Re:Which university?

[Ph33r th3 g(O)at]

Translation -- DeVry and Microsoft conspired to sell your eyeballs to advertisers, and we're going to use the per credit-hour computing fees you pay to fatten our administrative salary budget. Enjoy your glorified Hotmail account!

Re:Which university?

[coleridge78]

Any quota is not a low quota. "If one is set at all, it's with the expectation that it will be hit -- why else set it?" is basically nonsensical.

Your "lesson" didn't address or rebut any of my points. I'll give you the short version (hint: I'm basically agreeing with you on this part): Hard quotas on an inbox are dumb (for the reasons you stated among others), and nobody in higher education that I've come across lately is using them.

As for other storage, including IMAP folders, a quota is just fine--if the user has an academic or job-related need for more space, we give it to them. Making them ask puts a limit on people filling up infinite space with mp3s. :P We don't need to be in the business of storing *that* kind of data. By enforcing a quota, you do *not* make that choice. That claim is silly and nonsensical. You are making the user make that choice--they can keep their "real" data there and move their pictures of Anna somewhere else.

Re:Which university?

[coyotecult]

Is there any chance you have some like minded friends still at the university could get in contact with us? We've raised enough of a fuss that our University is talking to Microsoft again because we are complaining so hard. We'd love to get other Universities to do the same thing, if we could: iwantmypop.com contains all the information we've been working on so far and has ways to contact us.

POP access

[Reason58]

A quick google brought this up on the first page of results.

Re:POP access

[linzeal]

Yeah, this was fixed a few months after the service went alive. Move along, nothing to see here.

Re:POP access

[elysian1]

I've been using Thunderbird and the WebMail add-on for months now with my Live Mail account. Just download the WebMail extension and the Hotmail extension here: http://webmail.mozdev.org/installation.html After you have it installed it, go here for how to set up webmail: http://webmail.mozdev.org/setup.html Then, to make it work with Live Mail, go to Thunderbird's Add-ons menu and click the options button for Hotmail. You might need to add a new domain (probably your school's domain). Then go to the accounts tab and select Hotmail Website (BETA) mode for the new domain you've created. That should do it.

Re:POP access

[coyotecult]

Just so you don't think us totally lazy, we did figure out guides and instructions up for interfacing with Thunderbird before I posted this, but I was hoping there would be other methods, as well, because not all of us use Thunderbird. Eudora, Apple Mail, and even Outlook are other mail clients that people might be using.

Re:POP access

[JimDaGeek]

Oh, so I can use this "email service" from my Mac or Linux computer? No? Move along then.

P.S. How does a service go "alive" exactly? Did MS manage to build some Frankenstein service?

Re:POP access

[phlegmboy]

Agreed 100%. My uncle uses Hotmail/Live Email (or whateverthe hell they are calling it this week) and he uses the webmail addonwithout any problem whatsoever.

You can even put Thunderbird on a memory stick and then run it from that, bypassing any anti-install security that my be on the University computers.

Ludicrous, idiotic, stupid, corrupt

[SpaceLifeForm]

Well, those are my immediate thoughts.

When word gets out what University is comtemplating
this, well, I would not want to be associated with
the decision.

Re:Ludicrous, idiotic, stupid, corrupt

[DogDude]

It's ludicrous, idiotic, stupid, and corrupt to save money by outsourcing a commodity service like email? I'd say it's stupid NOT to. Is it also "ludicrous, idiotic, stupid and corrupt" is a university outsourced, oh, I don't know... electricity generation?

Re:Ludicrous, idiotic, stupid, corrupt

[coleridge78]

People overstate the extent to which email is a commodity service, especially when it involves large operations that are either extremely specialized or extremely heterogenous (as most universities are). When there are tens of thousands of people working in vastly different matters, a one-size-fits-all solution is rarely adequate. This is why so many people who are forced to use it (ie, not top-level execs who have secretaries to use it for them) hate the good old Exchange/Outlook environment. You have to adjust to how it wants you to work, no matter how inappropriate or plainly broken it is.

Re:Ludicrous, idiotic, stupid, corrupt

[DogDude]

How many different things can you do with email? Send messages. Receive messages. What kind of specialization could possibly be done to email, other than offering a POP3, IMAP, and web interface? And, I wouldn't lump in Exchange/Outlook in with regular ol' email. Email is just a tiny fraction of what Exchange does.

Re:Ludicrous, idiotic, stupid, corrupt

[coleridge78]

Intersections with calendaring, directory services (which at some Universities is a large range of functions, many others haven't caught up to 1999 yet), file exchange. Different users have wildly different needs for storage, volume, for auto processing (both filtering and archiving). Etc, etc, etc.

Re:Ludicrous, idiotic, stupid, corrupt

[Malc]

Seems rather childish. Who cares what this university does. If I was there, I would continue to use whatever email service I was already using. If I couldn't use that email address for official university business, then I would keep it separate but minimised. Just as today I keep my personal email completely separate from my work email. If I do share my work email address (or in this case, the University one) with non-work people, the first thing I do when I get an email from them is forward it to my proper personal address and respond from there. Most people never use my work address again.

*sheesh* Talk about making a mountain out of a mole hill. Grow up people.

Re:Ludicrous, idiotic, stupid, corrupt

[batkiwi]

Please justify your comments, if you can.

Here's a suggestion

[Anonymous Coward]

I know people are going to think I'm flaming...

But:

- Shut up.
- Don't worry about your email.
- Focus on your education.
- Don't make webmail out to be more complicated than it is, all you gotta do is click on a bookmark and type your password into a box.
- The Windows Live Mail team put extensive effort into making this a product that got past the "Optimized for IE" barrier that past MS shit tended to do.

Just stop worrying about something so trivial, let the Uni IT department do their job, and focus on getting yourself through college and into the real world where you can make a difference on shit such as this later on.

Re:Here's a suggestion

[RockyPersaud]

I agree, because technology should be our masters.

Re:Here's a suggestion

[cyberjunkie98]

I don't find it flaming although you didn't mince words. I like that. I've been called caustic several times for telling things as they are.

Communications via e-mail has always been a pet peeve of mine. I read once (it was either Dennis Ritchie or Ken Thompson) checked their email twice a day and set aside that time to do all of their e-mail correspndence. People seem to think that e-mail is like IM (and I won't even go off on that rant) and expect an instant response. If someone needs to contact me and would like an immediate reply, there's this thing called a phone. If you are close by, knock on my door. Too much time is wasted by having you mail client up, notifying of an e-mail and distracting you from whatever it was that you were doing. Don't get me wrong, e-mail is a great tool, can be a great time saver and definitely can CYA. It's just a matter of setting peoples expectations.

Re:Here's a suggestion

[Simon80]

I'm officially feeding a troll here, but in response, if the IT department were doing their job, he wouldn't have anything to worry about, because they'd be making more sensible decisions than this. They aren't, hence his complaint. There's also no sense waiting, since he can make a difference on "shit such as this" right now, rather than later.

Re:Here's a suggestion

[Anonymous Coward]

actually, depending one's situation, it can be a tremendous deal. let's see.

many schools have various filtering software installed that are harsher on hotmail, yahoo, etc. accounts while favoring the edu accounts. it got so bad, one of my professors won't use his .edu account because it was filtering so much of his students' emails.

a lot of us need the edu accounts for professional reasons. as a 1L at law school, having the edu address makes a lot more sense to me than my gmail account. regardless of its merit, there is some value to the name of your institution. would you rather be xxx@gmail.com or xxx@mit.edu

yes, you can forward the address to a POP account, but then when you're sending then you have to do double work...

Re:Here's a suggestion

[d^2b]

Hmm, well I agree that one shouldn't transfer Universities based on this as some other poster suggested.

On the other hand "let the Uni IT department do their job" is a two edged sword. I don't think University IT services are
anywhere near infallible, and they certainly can use (constructive) critisism. One thing that has astonished me is the degree to
which the fraction of the University budget consumed by the IT (or computing services, or whatever) seems to stay constant or increase while the actual services provided seem to go down. No doubt people on the inside have a different perspective, but
especially from a more DIY department like CS, it looks to us like they owe us a slice of their budget. Of course the politics are
complicated, but as far as I understand it, computing services does not want to take running the networks and labs that we do. Becaus e then it would cost them something, and we have no budget to give them.

So what does this have to do with the topic at hand?

Well, on our campus, email and public access labs are the only visible services provided by computing services (yes, I know they
run the network, but it is not clear everybody understands how expensive that is). So I think it would be bad politics for them
to eliminate (outsource) email.

Re:Here's a suggestion

[MilesNaismith]

I let a guy like you, follow me around for a day, that changed his mind. From new services that maybe YOU don't see but some other department does, to visible ones like Podcast servers, to just generally maintaining and updating the mountain of existing services, it can be quite a job in a DataCenter. You have 70,000 customers, all of them want better security, none of them want you to change ANYTHING about how they do their job because by God they've been using Telnet and FTP for 20 years.... Nobody will let you work on anything during the day so you have to schedule maintenance cycles during nights and weekends. You can't just "try something out", an extensive test procedure has to be followed for everything. Documentation must be maintained. Cross-training coworkers. At the end of the day I offered to let him answer my pager which goes over 3 or 4 times every night for something, he declined. Walk a mile in another man's shoes first.

Re:Here's a suggestion

[d^2b]

I didn't mean to diss the people who wear the pagers. That would be dangerous :-)

I believe you that your job is hard work, and stressful. I used to do IT support for medical doctors,
who have even bigger egos than professors :-), and when their billing system goes off line, they get tense in a a way that professors never have to. On the other hand, I am glad to say I never had to deal 70,000 MDs.

I guess my high level point, which maybe was obscured by the peculiar position of CS departments, is that outsourcing user-visible services is going to give ammunition to those that believe that there is fat in the IT budget. Because of tenure, the non-academic staff of a university are always the first to go in a crunch.

No POP service?

[HomelessInLaJolla]

One could write a shell script to negotiate the HTTP transactions with wget and pipe the resulting pages through a series of filters to strip away the page cruft (ads, navbars, menus, etc.) and the HTML tags and leave only the message text which could be inserted into standard system /var/mail files. After the shell script was sufficiently defined one could use the source code of wget, the source code of HTML libs, the source code of a mail daemon, and a little innovative C glue and write a formal local Windows Live Mail retrieval tool. Once the custom tool achieves any sort of popularity, though, then MS will begin to change the page formats subtly to confound the stripping filters. Then it'll be another radar race.

Why can't they just offer POP service to those who want it?

Re:No POP service?

[wile_e8]

Why can't they just offer POP service to those who want it?

Because then you could use non-Microsoft products to access your mail.

Re:No POP service?

[HomelessInLaJolla]

Because then you could use non-Microsoft products to access your mail. Is that in an RFC as a sign of the end of the world? How is that possibly a Bad Thing?

Re:No POP service?

[sumdumass]

And they couldn't take your links through the emails or send advertisments as easily.

Free is still about money..lol

Re:No POP service?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hpricot might be useful here.

http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/hpricot/

Re:No POP service?

[wile_e8]

Well, it's not, for the users at least. But if you are Microsoft, and your goal is to eliminate all software that competes with Microsoft software, it's a lot easier to force users to use your software than than to give them a choice and have to actually be better than the competitors.

My experience as a student and campus IT admin.

[jerbenn]

I work at a mid-size university and we outsource student email services to a state run provider. From my experience as both an IT admin and a student, I find that most student's don't use their campus provided email anyway......rather resorting to using their own personal accounts with hotmail, google, etc... The wise thing to do in my opinion is provide some sort of email service (outsourced is fine) for the small percent of students who actually use it, and allow student's to submit their own email addresses to the campus database.......which would then get loaded into the 'official' campus address book for use by faculty and other students.......

Re:My experience as a student and campus IT admin.

[Anonymous Coward]

The disadvantage of having official registered student e-mail addresses among many different domains/providers is that you have really no assurance that each message will get to the right person. Yes, you can verify that an official campus message left whatever server it's hosted on, but you can't verify that someone at another provider ever actually had the message delivered to their account.

I don't understand the problem with having a universal campus-hosed e-mail service. They have servers accessible to the outside world, so why not throw in an e-mail server? If you make it simple (ie: SquirrelMail seems to be a popular campus e-mail hosting app, probably cause of it's cost and simplicity), I wouldn't think size would be an issue, as long as you set the proper quotas per e-mail/user.

Having e-mail server admin duties has shown me many times more issues, concerning mail from provider to provider, can arise than I ever knew. Heck, I've seen e-mail message >100k be thrown back and have our domain blacklisted from their servers because it was considered "spam with an attachment." IIRC, the message was a summary of a recent event we hosted and the attachment was a photo of the guest we had.

Re:My experience as a student and campus IT admin.

[paeanblack]

I work at a mid-size university and we outsource student email services to a state run provider. From my experience as both an IT admin and a student, I find that most student's don't use their campus provided email anyway......rather resorting to using their own personal accounts with hotmail, google, etc...

Students will rely on whichever email system is more useful to them. If you do not provide a superior level of client compatibility, accessibility, reliability, and usability, then students will resort to using their existing address. Your mention of a "state-run provider" is making me assume that it is distinctly worse than even the second-tier free email providers, given my experience with government IT.

University-provided email usage will vary greatly from school to school. Those schools that provide useful tie-ins with other school directories and services will see more student use. The 200+ year-old universities that offer email for life are more likely to exist in a few decades than a 10-year old startup. At some colleges, students may the prestige of their school's domain in their address.

In this age, there is not much point in a school going halfway with an email system...either offer something reasonably close to the state-of-the-art or outsource it to someone who does. If you do neither, it won't get used. Even mandating the use of the school email doesn't work. You end up with professors collecting their students' gmail/hotmail/etc addresses at the beginning of the semester and having a TA type all those addresses into a mailing list.

Re:My experience as a student and campus IT admin.

[jerbenn]

There isn't any disadvantage.......as long as you develop a good system for the student to submit their email address to the campus database. This can be done through the campus portal (if one exists), or through a learning management system such as Blackboard. It really doesn't matter as long as the student has an 'easy' way to submit/update their email address.

One would think that a student would want to use the campus email system......however because of a variety of reasons including the fact that today's incoming freshmen generally have had the same email account since they were a preteen (ie. their yahoo account) most want to stick with what they have.

Another very valid reason to not have a universal campus-hosted email service is because of the changing dynamics in Higher Education. Distance Education is growing at an astounding rate. More and more student's are enrolled at universities that they never actually set foot on. I am in my last semester of a graduate program and can honestly say that I have never set foot on the campus. Because I am not on the campus, I never login to the campus network, I have no idea what email system they use...and really don't care. I submitted my gmail account through the campus LMS when I started my graduate program and that is the way it is listed in the campus address book. If I need to find someone else's email address on campus, I simply look them up in the campus address book......in this case via the LMS system.

Re:My experience as a student and campus IT admin.

[Professor_UNIX]

This surprises me as well. My university let you forward your campus e-mail account to wherever you want because they were fully aware 90% of the students wouldn't even be using their POP server to access mail since they had home accounts or used Hotmail/Yahoo, etc. Why on Earth would any university go out of their way to ban people from forwarding their personal university correspondence to the e-mail address of their choice? If I relied on e-mail communications from professors I'd just notify them at the beginning of each semester that they need to use my personal e-mail account because the university's official e-mail system is not supported on my platform. I'm sure they would be happy to adjust their distribution list with a simple substitution of your e-mail address.

Re:My experience as a student and campus IT admin.

[Dredd13]

The wise thing to do in my opinion is provide some sort of email service (outsourced is fine) for the small percent of students who actually use it, and allow student's to submit their own email addresses to the campus database

Are you high? Seriously, what color is the sky in the world you live in?

As a campus system admin, I would completely say bollocks to that. You're opening yourself up to tons of "I never got that message, Professor Xavier," and crap like that.

You give them a campus e-mail address. It's the *official* address. Delivery to that mailbox for all official college correspondence is guaranteed. THEN, if you opt to forward it off-campus to gmail or wherever, that's your own business, and you're responsible for the failings of such at your own peril.

Re:My experience as a student and campus IT admin.

[Anonymous Coward]

As a recent graduate, I have to say that's one of the most insane things I've ever heard. Your university email account isn't going to see a lot of personal traffic. That's why we have gmail accounts, is for personal usage. But the University email account is absolutely invaluable for school business. You use it to communicate with your class, via mailing lists, you use it to communicate with professors, you use it to receive mailing lists from the school for important things like registration and current events. The reason you wouldn't use offsite email accounts? You are GUARANTEED that your email won't find its way into spam filters, and you are guaranteed delivery. You can't expect that your uber-cool 1337haxx0r@gmail.com (note: Not an email account I would ever disgrace myself with) email account is going to be able to somehow miraculously manage to actually deliver an email to your professor.

University email accounts are just a great solution to dealing with all the headache, and provide a pretty good alternative to an ISP email for when you want to provide a pseudo-professional email account to someone online. (as in the case of a resume).

Re:My experience as a student and campus IT admin.

[jerbenn]

No, I am not high. As mentioned above I am a grad student (Distance Student) and my university allows me to input my email address into the campus database, which I can change as often as I want. I don't have to worry about setting up pop3 access or setting up auto-forwarding rules with the campus email system. I simply get my email from the university community straight to my personal email account. Yes, I do see that there is the potential for abuse.......and I am sure that abuse does happen.........but I have never seen it, nor have I heard any complaints......From my experience abuse is small enough that it is really a non-issue. There really is no blanket answer to this question......The very nature of universities dictates the best way to go......Public vs. Private....Distance vs. Brick & Mortar......small vs. large.......and as one posting indicated, some people take a sense of pride in having an email account associated with a certain school. If I were fortunate enough to attend, say MIT for example, I would certainly want to use my campus account........I would consider it a source of pride to have an email address such as $X@mit.edu

Re:My experience as a student and campus IT admin.

[Anonymous Coward]

Too...... many...... periods!!! ..... can't.... hold out..... much........... longer.............

aaaaaaaaaah!!!!! :(

Re:My experience as a student and campus IT admin.

[niiler]

Are *YOU* high? As a university professor, I get this ("You never told me xyz") all the time even when they've got the info on the syllabus, and have been told such info verbally every class all semester. You are over-inflating the importance of your email system if you think that the system you have has *anything* to do with students responding to your email.

Since gmail, or even AOL became ubiquitous, university-based email addresses really are extras that most students don't need or want. For that matter, neither do many of the rest of us. I already have too many email addresses (sourceforge and gmail for development purposes, sprintpcs and comcast as they are assigned to me because I subscribe to services, and my personal email addresses). Using Thunderbird to filter emails into the appropriate folder really is way easier from my viewpoint.

Re:My experience as a student and campus IT admin.

[Anonymous Coward]

"You give them a campus e-mail address. It's the *official* address. Delivery to that mailbox for all official college correspondence is guaranteed. THEN, if you opt to forward it off-campus to gmail or wherever, that's your own business, and you're responsible for the failings of such at your own peril."

That's EXACTLY the way we handle it. And we've found that out of a user base of over 80,000 only a few hundred forward their mail away without leaving a copy locally. And for web-based email access we use Horde/Imp and my stats show almost 40,000 distinct logins per day. So local services are most DEFINITELY being used.

Re:My experience as a student and campus IT admin.

[LoverOfJoy]

At my school, I stopped using the university provided email address because often the emails from professors often didn't get through. I heard from other students that this was common among university emails and I've since switched to my gmail address and haven't had any problems since. I don't know why the problem happens so often with the university emails but just last week I heard it happened to a newer student and the professor said the same thing: It happens sometime with university email addresses. You might want to switch to another email address.

Re:My experience as a student and campus IT admin.

[Dredd13]

I make no claim that the students will *react* any different, it simply allows the administration and faculty to say "We put that in your inbox. We can prove that via the logs. You're supposed to be checking your campus mail. If you didn't get it, didn't read it, didn't act on it, that's your business."

If I hand off the message to, say, GMail or Yahoo, I have no *proof* that it actually ended up in their inbox, only that a middleman mail server accepted it. That can make a world of difference when a student claims "I never got that notice which said to show up at this evening lecture or I'd get a failing grade," or whatever.

I've only worked on my campus two years, and I've already seen that come up twice, where the logs were pulled for e-mail to say "did this student send a message like they said they did", or "did this student receive the message like they claim they didn't?"

Re:My experience as a student and campus IT admin.

[More Trouble]

Why on Earth would any university go out of their way to ban people from forwarding their personal university correspondence to the e-mail address of their choice?

The primary reason I hear for University IT admins wanting to ban off-campus forwarding is that commodity email providers frequently block said Universities for forwarding spam. Or I should say "spam" since the spam in question is frequently commercial email the recipient signed up for (but no longer wants), official University communication (the recipient doesn't want), etc. I think the facile argument is that Universities have this "directory" which is useful, but provisioning email isn't really all that useful. This argument misses that widespread forwarding to commodity email providers threatens to destroy the usefulness of said directory.

Any other questions?

:w

Re:My experience as a student and campus IT admin.

[glitch23]

The wise thing to do in my opinion is provide some sort of email service (outsourced is fine) for the small percent of students who actually use it, and allow student's to submit their own email addresses to the campus database.......which would then get loaded into the 'official' campus address book for use by faculty and other students.......

That isn't the wisest thing to do though. I would want to use my personal account for receiving e-mail from professors or the school administration personnel but I wouldn't necessarily want everyone to know my personal e-mail address by having it published. If I choose to e-mail a professor using the personal account that is another story (I did that a lot before I graduated last year). The best way to solve that is to have a system (outsourced or not) that allows students to submit their personal e-mail address as a forwarding address for their school account. People needing to send e-mail to students wouldn't have to worry about the infinite number of e-mail address formats that students may have because they would all have the standard username format and school's domain name but students wouldn't have to check the specific school's e-mail system for their mail.

Re:My experience as a student and campus IT admin.

[mollymoo]

I've only worked on my campus two years, and I've already seen that come up twice, where the logs were pulled for e-mail to say "did this student send a message like they said they did", or "did this student receive the message like they claim they didn't?"

So you agree with huge restrictions on your users because it's useful in a specific eventually which happens on average once per year? Are you completely fucking insane?

Re:My experience as a student and campus IT admin.

[Allador]

why not throw in an e-mail server? If you make it simple (ie: SquirrelMail seems to be a popular campus e-mail hosting app, probably cause of it's cost and simplicity), I wouldn't think size would be an issue, as long as you set the proper quotas per e-mail/user.

This only works for the very smallest of the small colleges & universities.

My alumn, for example (which is not a particularly huge school), runs at 50,000-60,000 email accounts (students, staff, affiliates, etc), at 500MB each.

So thats ~60TB of data. And given the need for uptime and reliability, this means a very expensive highly redundant SAN, plus load-balanced (ie, clustered) front-end servers. Plus backup.

Figure at least a few hundred thousand dollars per year, in (amortized & ongoing) hardware costs and costs for staff time for updates, maintenance, support, etc. And thats with a full open source email stack.

So to answer your question, running email for a mid or large sized university is very expensive. Even more so given how fundamental email becomes to most organization ... try taking down the email server for a university and see how much work gets done.

But anytime you are spending that kind of cash on non-core (ie, not education or directly supporting education) service, you're obligated to at least consider alternatives.

Mind you, I dont think that outsourcing email is a good idea for Universities. And many universities cannot do this, as staff email is considered official public record, and so cant easily be stored by an outside provider that may have differing retention or protection policies.

Re:My experience as a student and campus IT admin.

[Anonymous Coward]

Are *YOU* high? As a university professor, I get this ("You never told me xyz") all the time even when they've got the info on the syllabus, and have been told such info verbally every class all semester. You are over-inflating the importance of your email system if you think that the system you have has *anything* to do with students responding to your email.

First off, you sound like a typical CS prof, which resembles a baby bird: all mouth and ass. Let the IT staff do its job, junior. On our servers I can prove what has been received and what hasn't, and sometimes profs want to know. Secondly, if you're operating on the university's dime you'd damned well better not be sending university proprietary information through a third party email server.

Re:My experience as a student and campus IT admin.

[toadlife]

As a school sysadmin who designed and runs the student email system I can assure you that this type of thing happens *far* more often than once a year, and the faculty and deans take the ability to track down individual messages for granted. If they lost this ability, I imagine they would be upset. Of course when higher ups propose solutions like this, they tend not to think of things like that until it's too late.

Re:My experience as a student and campus IT admin.

[Anonymous Coward]

I find that most student's don't use their campus provided email anyway...

Do you go to school in Utah or something?

Re:My experience as a student and campus IT admin.

[mcrbids]

The wise thing to do in my opinion is provide some sort of email service (outsourced is fine) for the small percent of students who actually use it, and allow student's to submit their own email addresses to the campus database.......which would then get loaded into the 'official' campus address book for use by faculty and other students.......

Yep, folks - somebody else has discovered the purpose of LDAP! Seriously, I wouldn't want a temporary university address, why would anybody else? I only use my work email address for related work. I've owned my own domain names for years simply to guarantee the consistency of my email address, which has remained unchanged for over 8 years now.

But anybody and everybody can register a freebie account at gmail or hotmail or cia.com.

Re:My experience as a student and campus IT admin.

[Nimey]

You know, you look like an utter wanker when you use all those periods. Let me introduce you to Mr. Comma: , He lives right next to your favorite key. You should also meet Mr. Semicolon, also in that area: ;

I'd say you need to take some remedial English classes.

Re:My experience as a student and campus IT admin.

[jerbenn]

If your were man enough to identify yourself.....I would kick your smart ass straight to China. You fucking immature retard! ......

Re:My experience as a student and campus IT admin.

[Nimey]

I don't see you using your real name, Mr. Tough Guy.

PS: You still write like a wanker.

Re:My experience as a student and campus IT admin.

[jerbenn]

I should have read some of your other posts before replying to your initial comment. That was a mistake on my part and I apologize for being rude and vulgar. After seeing how you generally treat others on this board it's quite clear that you have issues. I wish you the best and hope you find what your looking for. I will pray for you chap!

Re:My experience as a student and campus IT admin.

[Nimey]

Pray to Hastur, would you? Remember to say his name three times.

Please check out Thunderbird

[Anonymous Coward]

I have used Thunderbird against the hotmail client of Windows Live Mail. Thunderbird has a webmail addon, that supports hotmail and the Live Mail beta. I haven't tried it on non-Windows machines, but I see no reason it shouldn't work.

Good luck.

So basically they don't provide e-mail

[iamacat]

Just open a gmail account, forward e-mail from Windows Live and use the free POP.

Re:So basically they don't provide e-mail

[Anonymous Coward]

TFA:

"we're not allowed to forward our mail"

Re:So basically they don't provide e-mail

[thsths]

> "we're not allowed to forward our mail"

I would think that is much more of show stopper than not having POP3 or IMAP4. Not having protocol X is just an incomplete service, but not allowing any alternative means that they want a captive audience.

So what is next? "You have to attend our student introduction seminar, which is supported by Coca Cola commercials?" Scary world.

You have my sympathy

[dan dan the dna man]

I work at a University where Exchange dominates proceedings, like many other institutions. Watching staff and students stampede away from it when they realise there is an IMAP alternative when they are told about it (fine yes Exchange supports IMAP but the Uni's implementation does not) is quite heartening.

If they tried this at my institution there would be riots quite frankly - does everyone in your CS department run Windows? Even in the Biology departments not everyone runs Windows! I certainly couldn't accept this kind of situation occurring for staff, so I wouldn't therefore accept it occurring for students. In a world where the concept of choice is so readily bandied about as being 'a good thing' this is a retrograde step, regardless of who the vendor is.

Of course many of the students and staff already forward their email en masse to Gmail and either store it/deal with it there..

Re:You have my sympathy

[TubeSteak]

Of course many of the students and staff already forward their email en masse to Gmail and either store it/deal with it there..

Yea, but they still have an @myschool.com address.
That's kinda a big deal.

As an aside, you can get business/corporate discounts using a school e-mail address that you can't get with an @gmail.com

Re:You have my sympathy

[Nimey]

So far as I could tell, all the CS profs at my uni did use Windows, yes. No Mac users (this was when OS X was brand-new), but the chair did teach himself some Linux so he could teach a class. One prof proudly wrote his name with MCSE appended, ffs.

Sounds Dubious

[moehoward]

I am skeptical of your question/issue. I strongly suggest that you post a link to your institution's new policy. Or, post the policy here yourself. Your description is so "worst-case-scenario", that I have too many doubts. University's are not completely stupid and you have framed this as a "dumb-big-institution" gripe. I mean, your question is framed so that there is no possible answer. It seems to be a setup for a bunch of anti-MS posts and "what's-a-poor-student-to-do" grandstanding.

Also, if what you say is true then you can always get a free (as in beer) bot that will provide any auto-forward capabilities that Windows Live may not (or may) provide.

Re:Sounds Dubious

[Saeculorum]

One such institution that has conducted such a change is the University of Idaho. The information is available here. The ITS department has further clarified that they aren't even going to support Windows Live Mail Desktop (which is also in beta).

Re:Sounds Dubious

[troicstar]

yah sounds dubious, because they have offered our (smallish english ~c15k) university the service for free. The current exchange admins didn't hear a thing about it, because m$ didn't even bother getting their input. How long will it be free, and free in what way ? And how long will it be before value added 'power-admin' tools, pluggins and upgrades will come along that aren't free ? How long will it be before you have no other choice but to stick with it because it isn't interoperable with other VLEs or student records systems ? It is bait, switch and entrench\subvert.

Looking at the track record; the current exchange admin tools are a disgrace, especially with respect to groups. The beacon of standards-based design that is outlook-web-access fills me with confidence for future incarnations (compared to yahoo beta, fastmail, roundcube, squirelmail, horde or gmail) for example, i can only dread what kinda activex admin abomination this service is going to depend on. And to top it all off; guess who is going to be dealing with abuse and legal issues, yes it will still be coming to us despite the fact that the accounts are outsourced, they'll still be from 'our' domain.

Microshafted is what we'll be. No matter of how glossy the marketing people present it at first, it is still going to hurt, depress and frustrate a lot.

Re:Sounds Dubious

[Anonymous Coward]

Protest Site
School News Paper Article
Policy forbiding the forwarding to no uidaho.edu accounts

This is the same school that requires you to register your laptops MAC address to get on the network. Yes. they use MAC filtering as if it actually worked.

Re:Sounds Dubious

[thewils]

From the uidaho.edu link:

Can I change the appearance of VandalMail Live?
Windows Live Mail is extremely customizable. Not only are there several color themes, but students will be able to change the layout of reading panes.

Oh the choice! Several color themes no less...

Re:Sounds Dubious

[RWarrior(fobw)]

> University's are not completely stupid

You've obviously never been to mine.

Re:Sounds Dubious

[Anonymous Coward]

NOTE: as of July 1st, 2003, forwarding for students to non @ uidaho.edu addresses is not allowed. You may still set forwarding on your account to other email servers within the uidaho.edu domain.

Did anyone else notice the university motto?

University of Idaho
FROM HERE YOU CAN GO ANYWHERE!

Re:Sounds Dubious

[dhasenan]

Mine does the same. Spoofing MACs is quite common, but it gets the less technical users to get Windows updates at least once a semester. I'd prefer it if the scanning tool required you to turn automatic updates on, though, and if students were encouraged to use the managed Symantec client that updates its own definitions. Still, the current system is much better than nothing.

Re:Sounds Dubious

[IchBinEinPenguin]

VandalMail Live (Windows Live Mail)

What gives with the name?

Re:Sounds Dubious

[coyotecult]

Our mascot is "Joe Vandal", so named after the Vandals, an east Germanic tribe in the 5th century.

Re:Sounds Dubious

[Anonymous Coward]

You are clearly uninformed as to the political dynamics of a university IT environment.
Universities can and do make decisions in just this manner. I spent 10 years in IT at just such an environment.

It can be as simple as having a new CIO, Director, Assistant Director, Manager come in and say "I want one solution, and I've always had good experiences with MS so we're going with..." The reality is that they will often get thier way, with absolutely NO research, little experience, and no technical basis for the decision.

Second, I noted another fallacy above.
The idea that outsourcing mail makes sense. That's incorrect as well. To officially outsource your e-mail, you must contract for support, etc. That costs $/student/yr * X students = big$. Typical prices run from $7-$35 per student.

Those of you with some real experience can quickly do the Math and figure out that at a University with 10,000 student accounts (very small university) you can purchase hardware for redundant systems, and pay a full time worker's salary and benefits to manage it.

In reality, outsourcing is almost never a financial win, despite all the inflated spreadsheet assumptions about the number of people required to support things in house, etc.

In actual practice, mail systems which have been correctly configured and are robust in nature, require only 1-2 hours/day for a knowledgable administrator.

Other downsides of outsourcing:
Students frequently claim "But, I did send that e-mail" or "I sent it on time" or "I never received the assignment" blah blah blah
But if the service is hosted off site, you as an administrator must now jump through a world of hoops to trace one e-mail, instead of simply pulling the logs to show the timeline.

Now, all that said, the big evil plot to generate anti-MS posts: I don't think so. As I mentioned at the top of this rant, that's exactly how the university world works. In fact, let me grant you an example list of political power and decision making at universities

Most Power to Drive IT Decisions

University Board
University Board Secretary
University President
University Presidents Secretary
Any non-IT related Department head or dean (Religous Studies, English, Theatre, etc)
Deans secretary
Any tenured professor in a non-IT field
Deans and Department heads of IT related fields
Any tenured professor in an it related field
Tenure track professors - Any field - they are all just cannon fodder
CIO
IS/IT Director
IS/IT Assistant Directors/Department Heads
IS/IT Manager who ran the project team to study alternatives, price solutions, create detailed analysis of features vs. price, advantages, disadvantages, etc. and found the best solution and still saved $40,000/year on this project alone so maybe we can hire someone into this woefully understaffed department.
Students - you'd think these would be the key. The customers. Not so much. They are gone in 4-5 years and won't have enough money to be an influence as an alumni for several years.

Least Power to Drive IT Decisions

And yes, I was a university IT Manager holding the studies in his hand
The reality is that the university treats IT as a necessary evil. They want the technology and support, but consider it a cost center.

Never mind that it is somehow at the same time critically necessary that it be up 24 X 7 X 365 with no maintenance time allowed, and yet, we don't contribute to the bottom line directly, and aren't really necessary to the operation of the university...

Good luck.

Re:Sounds Dubious

[coyotecult]

Is there any chance you can coordinate with us to try and get your student body to complain to the tech people and try and pressure Microsoft into adopting POP? Our University is in conversations with them right now, but I can't help but think more nudging could only help us and maybe everyone.

I wish they would outsource!

[Attacked by Snakes]

I'm at a university in DC and they are also talking about outsourcing student's mail either to Yahoo or Google. They're starting the trials soon and there are a number of good reasons for it. Currently students are limited to 250 MB of mail which can be a problem when you're sending papers back and forth to your group paper. Also, they are currently using Lotus Notes webmail and it's horrible to use on the web, regularly failing and being generally backward in its use. Webmail clients like the new Yahoo client would be a fantastic improvement from what we have now.

Reason for the university to do it. I've talked with the folks running this and there are a bunch. 1) It's much cheaper to outsource your email than to run your own servers. 2) Re-purposing email servers to all those new services that you'd love to offer...like perhaps a library of recordings of lectures. 3) Long term relationships - While current student's email would be ad-free, the university could allow people to keep their school email accounts forever as long as they went ad-supported after graduation. That has a lot of benefits for the school community and may help them improve donations.

Personally I'm going to see if I can get in on the trial of this. I'd love to keep my email address from the university for a while, especially while I'm looking for a job after I graduate.

Re:I wish they would outsource!

[petermgreen]

1) It's much cheaper to outsource your email than to run your own servers.
is it really cheaper to have all your internal e-mail (must be quite a large volume if people are readilly hitting the limits on 250meg boxes) flying on and off campus several times.

also have they considered the potential cost of losing internal e-mail service if they lose thier internet connection?

Re:I wish they would outsource!

[coleridge78]

It's much cheaper to outsource your email than to run your own servers.

A lot of people are attracted to this argument. It's usually false. There's a particular case where, given perfect conditions, it will save you money: you're a small institution, outsourcing to a business large enough to get economies of scale on hardware and expertise which you can't hope for on your own, yet not so large that they can treat you any way they like and nickel-and-dime you to death down the road.

In the vast, vast majority of cases, and this has been shown almost without exception over the last fifteen years in experiments from outsourcing email to privatizing railways, what happens is the contractor ends up being more-or-less unaccountable (due to many factors) and costs a good deal more. There's the glaringly obvious that people always forget: when you outsource you may not even save any money on the 1:1 comparison, and on top of that you have to pay the contractor's profit margin! They're not doing it for free.

Re:I wish they would outsource!

[Malc]

If you've got documents that are so big that you're quickly filling up 250MB of mail space (and you for some bizarre reason you can't save the attachments and delete the messages from your inbox) then you need some other mechanism besides email for sharing said documents.

Outsource to Microsoft?!?

[cazbar]

If I were in a position of authority over a University network, would I outsource the email? Absolutely.

Would I outsource it to Microsoft? Not a chance in hell.

I'd find a company whose primary focus is email. That way I could expect some kind of service.

Re:Outsource to Microsoft?!?

[dattaway]

If I were in a position of authority over a University network, would I outsource the email? Absolutely.

Better idea: load up a small Linux box in a closet and drywall it:

http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB20010409S0012

Re:Outsource to Microsoft?!?

[Thirdsin]

I do agree that outsourcing email can be the most cost effective step.
That said, finding "a company whose primary focus is email" could be and would be problematic. How many companies today are large enough and reliable enough that only focus on email? And if you find one, what about 2, 3, and 4 years from now when the company begins to see opportunity in other markets... Unfortunately, the Holy Grail of email outsourcing does not exist (but hell, I could be wrong). I guess the trick is simply finding something reliable that works for your user base.

Virtual machine

[cerberusss]

You don't have the time to check mail in a webbased client, but it's no problem to leave a standard client running?

I find that somewhat funny. I think the real problem is that you hate it that they force a way of working onto you, which as an added benefit runs on the Evil Empire's platform.

My solution would be to run a virtual machine at home using VMWare, Xen or something. At the Uni, there will be enough Windows boxes available.

Re:Virtual machine

[Stevecrox]

Actually its one of those weirds things I can identify with, my University (university of Plymouth in the UK) runs a modified version of exchange and every single student gets a email account, all the lecture stuffs put on there as well. Its a great system, but it does take less time to turn on outlook 2003 and download a message than it does to open ie goto the site and then read your message, the other upside is you can set small devices like your WM5 phone/PDA for the IMAP server and get emails that way (much faster than stupid pocket explorer.)

Mostly its because while our exchange email interface is very close to outlook 2003 in appearence its far more clunky and has a ton of features you can't turn off which annoy me. Having seen Windows Live Mail beta (I really really don't want my hotmail account turning into something like this.) Lastly most students have multiple email accounts accessing them all from one client be it thunderbird to outlook is a lot easier than visiting 10 different web based emails.

Re:Virtual machine

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly why the hell should anyone be forced to buy a specific operating system (quite possibly hardware too) merely so they can use an email service? Why should students use software that is not of their choice? Bear in mind that "like it or lump it" isn't an acceptable answer in this situation if I am not in a course to learn about the operating system they're forcing me to obtain. A situation I have no doubt many students are being strong-armed into...

Re:Virtual machine

[cerberusss]

I totally agree with the sentiment, but that's the real world. Everyone tries to force your standards onto you, your uni, your employer, your government, etc. I'm just a lonely Linux user trying to find a way to get what I want.

Re:Virtual machine

[coyotecult]

Maybe I could explain:

I have my mail client set up to get my emails and I have certain filters that help me realize when my advisor emails me (because I want to respond to her as quickly as possible about my work). This way, I can work through the day, and my email comes to me. I know when something is important, and I have to respond to it quickly, and I can check the other stuff at my leisure. It's a great system.

If I had to use a browser, I'd have to remember to manually go check my email instead. It would be...very tiring. When I say, "I don't have time", it's not that I never have any free time, I think you're right--forcing this way of working on me really disrupts my process, and I don't like it, because I feel like I don't have the time to do this manually while I am trying to work. It takes more time for me to manually go and check the webmail, than to sit and know my mail client will notify me when stuff comes up. I can then work steadily and still respond in a timely fashion.

There's no point in using a Windows boxen that isn't mine to check the email--the point is to keep my mail with me. I don't want to download my emails onto someone ELSE'S computer.

Also keep in mind that the laptop I've been given by my department and the computer in my lab are both Macs, because my department likes them.

I saw a comment in the news article about it that's worse than my situation, too:

So far, Windows Live Mail has been a usability nightmare. I already found VandalMail's web interface to be a horrible experience, but at least I was able to take advantage of POP support and use a mail client. Now I am stuck with an interface that is even worse and no POP support. And since this is a Microsoft product, it is unlikely that it will ever have support for a service akin to Google Notifier for my Mac. Since I'm using Firefox on my Mac, Windows Live Mail won't even preserve my password, so I have to enter it each time I have to open a tab to check my mail. I'm guessing this feature only works with Internet Explorer and am highly dissatisfied with the decision to provide students with a mandatory e-mail service that is in any way OS-dependent.

I've written about my personal issues via Microsoft's user interface feedback form, and I've encouraged the other students to do the same for their issues. In the meantime, I'm stuck with a highly inflexible mail service. I think outsourcing is fine, but it would be much better to use Gmail or Yahoo! Mail. Both support POP and IMAP, and Google's Notifier service is invaluable to someone such as myself, who is the TA for over a hundred students who have many questions around test time. Windows Live also doesn't let me forward to another account.

This person has one hundred students who are going to email him questions that he needs to answer. It's his job to answer these students timely, and his job is to cater to students learning in their classes, and the university has crippled that ability. More's the pity--he might have been able to swing a staff account if he knew ahead of time how bad this was going to be.

Does Google support IMAP yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

My University is switching to Google. One of my concerns is that I really like my desktop clients (alpine and thunderbird) and prefer IMAP. While gmail is an excellent web-client, I don't really use my gmail account that much, because it doesn't offer IMAP & POP is both "flaky" and limiting.

Does google's hosted service offer IMAP? Or are there plans to in the near future?

Re:Does Google support IMAP yet?

[electrosoccertux]

Does google's hosted service offer IMAP? Or are there plans to in the near future? No and I doubt they will. Imap means you don't need to use the webinterface to delete email permanently. Then they wouldn't be able to get _any_ advertising revenue.

Re:Does Google support IMAP yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems like my POP access can delete the e-mail just fine.

Re:Does Google support IMAP yet?

[ibbey]

Gmail doesn't support IMAP, but they've supported POP for ages. You can happily use a gmail address & never set foot on their website after you set up your account.

Re:Does Google support IMAP yet?

[pato101]

Sure. Let me add that you can forward mail to a given address or select if POP retrieval deletes messages at the server or not.
IMAP would make sense, though, since you could access to the gmail account with your favorite client. Nevertheless, since gmail does not use folders (uses labels) I guess they do not offer IMAP because of that lack (heh, they say it is a feature :-P and probably is because their automagic organization of the mail threads )

Re:Does Google support IMAP yet?

[jZnat]

Yeah, because that delete button is so damn hard to press without accidentally clicking on an ad...

Google Ads don't make you money based on hits; people have to click them first.

Re:Does Google support IMAP yet?

[timeOday]

Aren't all emails through google's systems branded with advertising? I would find that extrememly annoying.

Re:Does Google support IMAP yet?

[DDLKermit007]

The only problem with Gmail POP is that you have to log in to check your spam folder. Not at least being able to receive the spam flagged as spam is one thing, but please, you've gota be able to turn the spam filter off. I was wanting so badly to use Gmail/Google Apps for my work's email system since the other option was Exchange, but having to tell my boss "log into the Gmail site to check your spam" is not an option. It's one of those WTF things personally.

Re:Does Google support IMAP yet?

[Premo_Maggot]

No.

Re:Does Google support IMAP yet?

[iroll]

Just a "me too," as my university has also just moved to a Google solution. I haven't had much to do with it, however, since my university address has been forwarded to gmail for years.

It can't be any worse than that godawful "Blackboard" based system that they had before. I'm not really sure of its pedigree; it was either home-brew that interfaced with BB or it was some kind of abomination that BB managed to sell them. Either way, it blew.

If I wasn't using gmail, I'd probably still be using mail.app or (haha) pine. Update: I just checked and pine doesn't work anymore :( Oh the fun I used to have, telnetting into my email from Mom's house over winter break, getting lost in menu hell, trying to figure out what it did to my attachments... At least they closed the telnet server and require SSH now.

Re:Does Google support IMAP yet?

[coyotecult]

Do you know under what conditions the ads would/would not be there? Does it cost extra, and if so, how much?

Re:Does Google support IMAP yet?

[yoyhed]

I think he was talking about whether your outgoing emails have a line at the bottom that's an ad for Gmail, in which case, no, Gmail doesn't have that. Now, the web interface has Google text ads (but even if those bother you, does anyone worry about ads anymore? Adblock Plus for Firefox or built-in content blocking for Opera!)

Re:Does Google support IMAP yet?

[1lus10n]

There is very little that IMAP offers that pop doesnt offer. None of which would be advantageous to google. Both of which are better than the nothing that ms live is offering.

Re:Does Google support IMAP yet?

[1lus10n]

I dont worry about text based ads that are unobtrusive. Windows live however will probably support that fucking annoying mouse over pop up windows live "search for this" spam. Plus it still doesnt support pop or imap, doesnt work on anything but ms (and probably only on vista & xp).

Gmail might not be perfect, but its leaps and bounds better than ms live.

Re:Does Google support IMAP yet?

[yoyhed]

Oh I definitely agree that text ads are unobtrusive, and that those fucking green-underlined-mouse-over-tooltip ads are really annoying.

And yeah, Gmail rocks (perfect in my book) and I don't support the notion of universities migrating to Windows Live (if anywhere, Universities are where you'll find Linux and Mac users who don't want to dual-boot or VMware Windows just to have more than the Hotmail interface).

Re:Does Google support IMAP yet?

[Antique Geekmeister]

POP3 does have two advantages to the provider: it doesn't support distinct mailboxes on the server side, so that takes a computational load off the server. And every default POP3 client in the world autodeletes mail from the server, so it helps reduce the load off the servers for clueless users.

Re:Does Google support IMAP yet?

[sash]

I agree on the last two points.
  But I would not call "very little" storing mail on the server, having folders, searching.. everything that is necessary to access the same mail storage from my office PC, from my notebook (either connected or disconnected, thanks to local caching) or from a Web Mail. No, sorry, POP3 is just not good enough!
  So, for me GMail is very nice for "emergency" use, for having an SMTP that I can use from anywhere, and for all the website registrations; and I love the label thing (I wish Thunderbird had it now!), but it's not going to be my main mail until they support IMAP.

Re:Does Google support IMAP yet?

[psymastr]

You can do that until Gmail's POP fails on you. It's done so numerous times here and I've given up on POP. I just use the website.

It fails with some attachments, someone will send me an attachment (not viruses or anything) and then POP fails. You can't login with your mail client. You have to use the website and delete all your mail with attachments until you find the culprit. Again, nothing wrong with the attachment itself, just some bug with Gmail.

Re:Does Google support IMAP yet?

[misleb]

It can't be any worse than that godawful "Blackboard" based system that they had before. I'm not really sure of its pedigree; it was either home-brew that interfaced with BB or it was some kind of abomination that BB managed to sell them. Either way, it blew.

Blackboard is one of those things that everyone (ok not *everyone*) uses and everyone also hates. I've never heard of anyone actually liking Blackboard. It just happens to occupy a comfy niche market with a feature set that is hard to ignore. They need more competition.

If I wasn't using gmail, I'd probably still be using mail.app

mail.app, as in that old program, or Apple Mail? I love Apple Mail. I use it to POP my Gmail account because I much prefer a desktop app, searching is much faster, and I can aggregate my various email accounts much better.

-matthew
-matthew

Re:Does Google support IMAP yet?

[iroll]

Apple Mail. I use it at work, and I like it too--better than Outlook or Eudora, for sure.

However, I've gotta say that gmail's "conversation" organization is the killer feature for me as a home/personal user. I stick with the web interface strictly for that. If Mail used conversations, I'd never ever go back.

Re:Does Google support IMAP yet?

[Premo_Maggot]

There are targeted ads on the page, but there are never ads in any emails you send like hotmail does.

Google Apps

[physicsphairy]

Google Apps for Education

2GB of space. POP3. Spam filtering. Cost? $0.

I use a .forward file at my school just because the local mail is so unreliable (downtime, messages lost, etc.). Even *that* has been a liability when they have managed to crash their RAID array and not have a backup. That was when final projects were due, too. And they limit us to 250 megabytes total on the system. Oh how I yearn for the day they will here my humble petitions and switch to Google Apps.

Re:Google Apps

[RealSurreal]

"they will here my humble petitions"

I hope you're not on an English course.

Re:Google Apps

[Anonymous Coward]

And they limit us to 250 megabytes total on the system. Oh how I yearn for the day they will here my humble petitions and switch to Google Apps.

250 megabytes!? Luxury! I work for a government agency and our quota is only 100 megabytes on our Exchange system. GMail is very popular these days.

Re:Google Apps

[Anonymous Coward]

"I hope you're not on an English course."

I hope you're not enrolled in an English course.

Do they supply free Windows?

[rev_deaconballs]

If this forces you to use windows they need to offer windows for every student free of charge. If this is not the case or if you cannot load windows on your machine, such as a powerbook, they need to supply a work around. You should ask your university's ACS if they do have a work around for those situations. You should also get involved with your student officials. They can get signatures to see how many students do not desire using a Microsoft mail client.

Re:Do they supply free Windows?

[praseodym]

It doesn't force him to use Windows, there's webmail for that. But the only desktop email client (Live Mail Desktop) works only on Windows.

Tell the rest of the students not to use it

[Anonymous Coward]

Why aren't you allowed to forward??? How is that enforced?

I take some classes at a local CC once in a while. I was told that I *MUST* have a specific email account. Ya know, I never, EVER use it. I have checked it, and all that was in there was spam, both from the school and from outside sources.

Every instructor that I have had that required an email address, asked for one to be provided to them. No worries for me there.

Pros/Cons?

Probably from a non techie, this isn't going to matter. For somebody that does not like Window's products, it is just going to make you rebel against them more. Like me, you will try to steer yourself from Windows in the future.

For the school? They do get some control of communication with their students, at least the students that comply with this rule. Who gains profit from this move? Not the students/school.

Too bad they just cannot provide an email address and let folks use whatever client they would like to access it.

Re:Boo Hoo

[jcr]

Thanks for that enlightening perspective, Mr. Ballmer.

-jcr

Apple Laptop on Live Edu site

[praseodym]

I love the Apple laptop (MacBook Pro/PowerBook) on the Windows Live Edu website!

Re:Apple Laptop on Live Edu site

[sokoban]

Yeah, and the demo which isn't a demo at all, but rather a shitty commercial.

What are the specific requirements?

[khasim]

As with any project, you have to determine the specific requirements before you can even THINK of looking at vendors.

#1. Must support pop3 - will test using clients X, Y & Z.

#2. Must support imap - will test using clients X, Y & Z.

#3. Must support 1 & 2 with encryption - will test using clients X, Y & Z.

etc.

It is the requirements that make or break projects. Determine the requirements and how you'll be testing to see if those requirements will be met and THEN you can start looking at which vendors can meet those requirements (and testing to see that they actually DO meet them).

Re:What are the specific requirements?

[Antique Geekmeister]

POP3 can go away. Seriously, the lack of server-side mailboxes and the default behavior of every POP3 client in the universe of automatically deleting email from the server when first installed makes it a nightmare to support for people with laptops or other tools allowed to synchronize with the server. It only takes one accident with a new POP client to accidentally flush someone's entire mail spool from the server and take it out of the backup system, and porting such email *back* from the client to the server to make it accessible to the other clients is a nightmare.

POP3 gains you nothing over IMAP these days, except that it's slightly less work for the mail server to maintain a single mail-spool and force each clients to set up their own set of mailboxes. This is, of course, an insane amount of work for someone who uses multiple mail clients on multiple machines.

Also, neither IMAP nor POP3 should be supported *without* encyrption in any sane environment these days.

Holes in his argument?

[rueger]

First, keep whatever mail and address you already use and leave the uni one just for uni announcements. Check it once a week - no big deal.

Second,a cursory glance at the Windows Live website finds the Windows Live Mail Desk top Beta, which appears to be a standalone (Windows only of course) client that will download the Live mail messages. The claim that e-mail can only be accessed via web mail seems to be not correct.

Really, I can't think that this is a real problem for this guy. What with hotmail, yahoo mail, gmail etc he can pretty much have his main address and e-mail anywhere he likes. He could even pay for a regular ISP account and manage all of his mail any way that he chooses.

Re:Holes in his argument?

[Sancho]

From the freaking summary, man:

Because of that limitation, the only freely available mail client it supports is Windows Live Desktop, which is only available on Windows and I'm worried its ads might be vulnerable to malware just like the ones in Live Messenger. I depend on my mail client and I am concerned about this, because we're not allowed to forward our mail but are responsible for information received there from the University and classes, I'm not on a Windows machine, and I don't have the time to regularly check for web-mail, during the day." He notes the client, notes that it is Windows only.

Re:Holes in his argument?

[SteveAyre]

I know most slashdotters don't read the articles, but did you even read the summary?

Because of that limitation, the only freely available mail client it supports is Windows Live Desktop...

He knows about the program, but doesn't use Windows so the program is useless to him and many others at his university, and he doesn't want to use webmail.

As for emails it might be. Uni announcements probably will be sent out a week or two in advance so he can check them fine on campus, but universities use email for more than that (at least my one does) such as lecturers letting students know stuff. Assessment clarifications, rescheduling tomorrows lecture, that sort of thing. Things you want to see straight away, not sometime next week. I might be biased though - I do a computer science course so my department are probably more likely to use it for that sort of thing than others.

Re:Holes in his argument?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't afford to check school e-mail only once a week. Professors regularly use school email for important and time-sensitive announcements ("Tomorrow's exam is actually in Porter 100, not Baker 100", etc.), so checking less than daily is pretty much out of the question.

Re:Holes in his argument?

[coyotecult]

I'm going to confirm what other people have said--I mentioned Windows Live Mail Desktop in the article. But it's only for Windows, and our student body does have a decent percentage of Mac users: our Bookstore is an authorized Apple dealer.

For me, personally, it might not end up being a real problem: I haven't switched over to the system for now, so I'm safe until May 15th. I might graduate before everyone is forced, and it's possible my department might give me a staff email if I ask and bat my eyelashes real hard--although none of those are certainties. (Staff and faculty are not being moved to Windows Live; they are being moved to an MS Exchange server.) But I have friends who have switched before they realized it would lock out their mail clients, and it's a problem for them. And now that I've been talking to people, I've found other people who have been similarly stranded. Once they switch their account over, they're not allowed to move back.

State university; needs of professors

[davidwr]

If it is a state-run university you may be able to slow the process down by using public pressure or lobbying. Write your state lawmakers. Cite issues like "unfairly giving one company the upper hand at the expense of others" and "forcing students to view ads as a course requirement" etc. If you are lucky, you may find their actions violate state law, although I doubt that's the case.

Talk to professors. Some of them may be running projects which require that certain information never leave the school campus except over secure channels. Or they simply might not want to send certain information anywhere within 1000 miles of Redmond. Find out who they are and have them lobby to change the requirement.

Also find professors and students who are anti-monopoly and anti-forced-advertisements. There should be plenty of them in the School of Liberal Arts. Get them to lobby also.

Given that the decision has already been made, it's probably too late for you. I hope these suggestions help others whose schools are considering outsourcing functions to unrelated entities.

When it comes to educational IT outsourcing of just about anything other than consumer software, I recommend:

• Have a contingency plan if the outsourcing arrangement doesn't work out or the outsourcing partner quits or folds
  
• Buy a white-label solution, with the University's brand on it and no paid advertising unless each ad is university-approved, and no paid ads in IT environments students or employees are required to use. Instead of "GMail," it's "MyUMail."
  
• In ad-free areas, only a discreet mention of who the vendor actually is
  
• All university data is segregated from the vendor's other customer's data
  
• All sensitive data is encrypted to/from the campus or to/from the campus-affiliated person's computer
  
• Only certain vendor employees are allowed access to the data, and then only as needed to do their jobs
  
• Take extra precautions with information related to identity, grades, payroll, class schedule, and other potentially sensitive information. If email and file-storage is outsourced, be aware that employees and students may put others' sensitive information on that space as part of their jobs or classwork. This data needs to be protected as it would be if the data and its backups were controlled by the University.
  

Re:State university; needs of professors

[coleridge78]

It's semi-likely, depending on details, that this sort of setup would end up in FERPA violations. Very little identifiable information related to student's education is allowed to be distributed to anyone, for any reason, except very narrow classes of University personnel as directly applicable to their jobs (eg, your advisor has to be able to look at your transcript). The duty is the University's, and cannot be transferred via contract. So no matter what indemnities are in their agreement, if an MS employee reads an email between a professor and student, or even sees a subject line connecting a student to a particular course, the University is subject to very serious financial penalties. It seems like a very risky proposition.

Re:State university; needs of professors

[Anonymous Coward]

Not financial, criminal!

BTW, in general, international students are not covered by FERPA, so it would be OK to use their account in a beta outsourcing test :)

Re:State university; needs of professors

[coleridge78]

It's criminal, but my understanding was that the penalties are all institutional and financial; unlike HIPAA, there isn't any personal liability, jail time, etc involved. I might be wrong though.

Re:State university; needs of professors

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows live mail for unis does not contain ads. I know this because the school I work at is thinking about moving to it and that's the first thing I asked about. That said, I'm still totally against it for many reasons, and none of them have to do with it being Microsoft.

What crap.

[Trendy.Ideology]

I hate this type of BS. The individual(s) responsible should be shot in the face for making such ignorant decisions. I 3 me some gmail and I would have a seriously big beef with being forced to use some crappy client/site outside of gmail. I hope someone at this college writes a program to log in for you and forward everything to your account of choice.

Re:What crap.

[Trendy.Ideology]

Whoops. Yay HTML, forgot that < would get caught as html with I meant to <3 gmail.

Re:What crap.

[DogDude]

I think you should be shot in the face for using GMail. I use Yahoo.

See how much sense that makes?

Re:What crap.

[Anonymous Coward]

gmail, unlike hotmail, gives you free pop3 access you fucking moron.

Re:What crap.

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't feed the trolls.

Re:What crap.

[SheeEttin]

This is Slashdot, we bash Microsoft here.

Re:What crap.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not DogShit... With regards to Microsoft, his nose is as brown as a Zune.

Re:What crap.

[Trendy.Ideology]

Gmail is superior. It's really just that simple.

Academic Freedom

[MrZaius]

Look at it from a political perspective. Are there members of the computer science depts or other professors of other sciences & mathematics or graphical arts departments that hold professors that use, or even just would prefer to use, UNIX (Mac OSX, Solaris, etc) or Linux? See if you can get them to sign off an open letter. Bug your school paper. Bug the highest levels of your school's administration. It shouldn't be too hard to make an effective case against your school's IT department's attempt to force vendor lock-in on the campus on the grounds of academic freedom. Who knows? You might even get some people to listen.

How is this a problem?

[ChrisRed]

OK, so there's no pop or imap (maybe there could be?) but I've just tried my Live Mail account on my server box here in Konqueror and it worked just fine.

In fact, I think I prefer it because it shows 'classic mode' which looks like old hotmail rather than the new one which I can't stand.

Yikes

[catdevnull]

What a bone-headed idea. I work for a University IT department and that kind of thinking is nuts even for an underfunded .EDU IT dept.

I betchya what happened is some CIO drank some Redmond Kool-Aid and made a deal with the devil. Sounds like everything on that campus is about to go to Exchange. My condolences.

Vendor-neutrality

[frisket]

Any institution which forces users to buy one specific platform just in order to read mail has its head so far up its ass that it might just as well climb up in after it and disappear.

Even in my own institution, which is slavishly Microsoft-dominated, both student email and faculty/staff email are accessible from any platform. Not necessarily optimally -- OWA is probably the suckiest email interface ever devised -- but no-one is placed in the position of not being able to read college email just because they happen to use a Mac, or a Sun, or a Linux box.

It's an education/training problem: most Windows users are only very dimly aware that anything else exists: they may have heard of Apple Macs but probably not of Linux. They've certainly never seen or used anything except Windows, and are thus completely baffled and uncomprehending at the concept of someone who is not a Windows user.

When that species of ignorance exists at decision-making level, you will get people making unwise decisions because they are simply unaware that any problem exists. If they are already that badly brainwashed, then recommendations for alternative action from lower down the food chain will have no effect, because they lack the cognitive hooks on which further information can hang.

Re:Vendor-neutrality

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't understand your comment; Windows Live Mail is not Windows-only,
that's only the branding of it. It's Hotmail!

Re:Vendor-neutrality

[coyotecult]

I should note that the email is pretty much available through webmail on all systems in some form, to my knowledge, even if the person needs to use their "Classic" version that cuts down on the features to work better with some browsers. People on non-Windows platforms aren't totally locked out, but they are in suboptimal positions, if that makes any sense.

I know that the IT department realizes that Apple computers exist. The Bookstore is an authorized Apple dealer, their VMobile program

Outsourcing in a university environment

[rakslice]

There doesn't seem to be a lot of discussion about the specific context, so I'll just brainstorm out loud for a bit:

- Is the IT department that made the e-mail outsourcing call in charge of purchasing hardware and OS/software licenses for academic departments' general computing needs? If not, is there a plan to provide academic departments with fully functional access to the e-mail solution on whatever platforms they are using?

- What about ADA compliance? Do the proprietary client and the platform it runs on have sufficient features to make them as accessible as accessible standards-based clients that could have been used previously? Alternately, is the web mail component accessible? Does it provide all the features of the proprietary client?

baaaad move...

[TheCoop1984]

The IT department should all be shot. Simple as that

Because of security, outsourced email is short-ter

[scruffy]

Current email is a security and privacy hole. All sorts of information goes though plain text email that is probably against university policy to make public. Having your email go through a third-party site makes creates an even bigger hole.

This is a horrible idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is one of the dumbest things I have ever heard of, and not because it involves Microsoft. IMAP is nice, but not necessary. POP is necessary, and the fact that it is not being provided is outrageous. This is a dumb idea and whoever came up with it is, by association, dumb. On the flip side, how fucking hard is it to take 5 minutes out of your day and go to one of the labs at your school to check your mail? I don't care who you are, nobody is too busy that they can't find a couple minutes to do this. Maybe you need to cut down on your masturbation sessions.

Re:This is a horrible idea.

[coyotecult]

On the flip side, how fucking hard is it to take 5 minutes out of your day and go to one of the labs at your school to check your mail? Once a day works for some people. But I get emails from advisors and colleagues all throughout my work day. My department gave me a laptop to work on for a reason.

Low crisis threshold or liar?

[clang_jangle]

Windows Live Mail = Hotmail. Get it in your browser. Assuming this isn't a made-up story it seems to me the U in question would have to be some really backwards institution, like a Fundie "Christian" school or something...

Re:Low crisis threshold or liar?

[clang_jangle]

It wasn't flamebait, it's an observation. The OP is actually more flamebait than my response, but oh well.

Transfer to another school...

[olliec420]

Microsoft (especially their free services) suck ass. If they want to outsource they should be going with AppRiver's hosted exchange. They are the only hosted exchange service with unlimited mailbox storage. If anyone claims unlimited mail store they are reselling appriver's service. They also have the #1 spam filtering service included. http://www.appriver.com/ take a look...

absolutely insane...

[TheCoop1984]

I'm in a university that runs its own mail server, and the entirety of university life is organised through it. If the uni email went down, even for a couple of days, the university would, quite literally, descend into chaos. If they outsourced the email to anyone there would be a university-wide riot, simply because it will be out of the control of the (extremely competant) IT department.

The whole IT dept at this uni who chose windows live mail (why, for god's sake? WHY???) should be boiled. Very, very, slowly. Then shot, dissected and paraded around the grounds as an example. Then really hurt

The idiots

Re:absolutely insane...

[SheeEttin]

And your university's IT budget is how big?

Re:absolutely insane...

[TheCoop1984]

Well, it is the main hub for Eastnet

Uni = large percentage of Mac users

[reidconti]

Not too familiar with the Live Mail service mentioned here, but if it truly is Windows-only that would be really confusing. I suspect easily 15-20% of my university students used Macs. It makes sense, if you realize that Apple has relatively higher marketshare in laptops, and most students use laptops.

Of the 10 or so people I'm close friends with that bought new computers while in school (graduated 06), every single one of them bought Macs. About 50% were former Mac users, and 50% switched from Dell or HP type systems. Nobody was buying Windows.

Not sure if this is just my friends, or my (West-coast) school, or if these students are representative of what will be happening on a wider scale in the future...

Sounds complicated

[Mateo_LeFou]

Isn't it easier just to have university policy say "This university best viewed using Internet Explorer"? It could also say "c'mon, everyone uses windows, what are you a communist?"

Re:Sounds complicated

[pato101]

despite the sarcasm...
The question is not that everyone uses windows, but that everyone will have to use windows forever- which is a different thing. Also, when choosing standard tools and protocols, everyone using windows will not loose any capability.
Furthermore, your point is in contradiction with the word "university".

Re:Sounds complicated

[jazman_777]

The question is not that everyone uses windows, but that everyone will have to use windows forever-

Only the professional students. The rest will either drop out or graduate, and move on to other things.

Re:Sounds complicated

[SheeEttin]

Whether or not a degree will be useful in a job, the better-paying jobs will either require a degree, or you will be greatly aided in getting the job if you have said degree.

I believe there was a story on this quite recently, too.

Re:Sounds complicated

[oohshiny]

Isn't it easier just to have university policy say "This university best viewed using Internet Explorer"?

Yes, it is. And it might even be reasonable if Microsoft weren't a convicted monopoly that charged $500+ for less functionality than people get free from other sources.

Therefore, it might be even more reasonable to say "This university best viewed using Firefox (if you are using IE, please upgrade _here_)."

Re:Sounds complicated

[TeknoHog]

"c'mon, everyone uses windows, what are you a communist?"

It's funny that Americans say 'communism' when they refer to a centrally planned economy in a totalitarian government. Of course, there's nothing centrally planned or totalitarian about everyone using Windows.

Re:Sounds complicated

[jonbryce]

The art / graphic design department, if they have one, will almost certainly use macs.

Re:Sounds complicated

[Edgester]

It can be a problem if the University is subject to the ADA. I know of one University that has made email an official communications channel and doesn't allow autoforwarding of email. Granted, this University uses Exchange, which is fine, but if it tried to use Live Mail, then ADA and official communication channel factors would make for a strong case against Windows LiveMail.

Re:Sounds complicated

[Saikik]

I'm sure on a scratch of paper in Bill Gates office he planned to have everyone use Windows. The totalitarian country of Microsoft bends people to their will constantly.

Issue is not about in/out sourcing or vendor lock

[Anonymous Coward]

Its the advertising. If the insitution you have entrusted to develop your critical reasoning skills, uses your enrollment as something to sell to advertisers (or at least to swap for email services), you have a major problem.

Regardless of faculty, one of the biggest roles of a univeristy is to develop independent thought. (Professional training and accreditation is an important, but secondary matter). Advertising corrupts that independence to its core by providing a dollar value on who gets to 'speak' to the students.

The issue has strong parralels with course 'sponsorship'. How would we feel about 'sponsoring' software development classes?

Address your concern to the right place

[Anonymous Coward]

First, check with your associated student body and see if they were involved in the decision. If they were and they agreed with the switch, then you should be addressing your thoughts to them rather than the IT department. If it's like most IT departments, they probably laid out the costs of the various options to the stakeholders (i.e. administration, associated student body) and they made the decision to switch. Also, I have seen people mix up the beta status of Windows Live - Windows Live Mail is not beta, but Windows Live Desktop is.

Re:Address your concern to the right place

[Tyrven]

That's incorrect. If you go to mail.live.com (at least via FF on a Mac) you'll get forwarded to hotmail. Once you sign in to (or, in my case, create) your Hotmail account you'll be given the option to try Windows Live Mail beta. Once you confirm, you'll be brought to a mail.live.com address with a banner graphic that reads "Windows Live Mail Beta".

Re:Address your concern to the right place

[Anonymous Coward]

I cannot verify that for FF on a Mac at the moment, but FF on Windows takes me to the non-beta site.

Re:Address your concern to the right place

[Tyrven]

Non-Beta Hotmail or Windows Live? I just signed up for a new account using IE7 on Windows 2003 Server and got the same use case as outlined above (Hotmail -> Windows Live).

It may be different on Vista. I know that during the Vista beta users were automatically enrolled in the Live.com Beta. It may be that with the release of Vista live.com (and subsequently mail.live.com) is deemed RTW for Vista users. Curious.

Re:Address your concern to the right place

[coyotecult]

We're trying our utmost hardest to figure that out, believe me. I've been lead to understand that the SCAC was part of this decision process. They are set out in the student association's rules to:

The Student Computing Advisory Committee (SCAC) shall make recommendations to the Vice Provost for Outreach and Technologies on policies and procedures related to student computing technology. These may include any of the following actions: review of operations, budgets, services, and needs for student computing; prioritizing financial expenditures; and assisting in the development of long-term planning.

However, we have gotten a response back from the faculty co-chair of the SCAC saying that they last met in Spring 2006 and were not involved with the implementation, and suggested I contact the student co-chair.

CONTROL is a big issue

[MilesNaismith]

CONTROL over the mailboxes is a very real issue for any large operation. By that, I mean all the business that gets transacted over email, that the organization needs to protect from inappropriate eyes, and make available to appropriate ones. With an on-campus system, if an employee walks off the job, and the organization needs access to their mailbox there are procedures for that which respect privacy while making sure what of it that is business-related is retained. Similarly if a student claims "I sent my homework, the email system must have eaten it!" the prof can call us up, we check the logs, and say whether the student is lying or not. You can probably think of other scenarios but I think you get the idea. University higher-ups probably won't like the idea, that when things all go wrong, they can't just pick up the phone and have a flunky immediately fix it. That sort of service just doesn't happen with GMail or MS mega-corporations, you wait in their live-chat or phone-queue like everyone else.

Re:CONTROL is a big issue

[Anonymous Coward]

"You can probably think of other scenarios but I think you get the idea." You are 101% right about control and I vouch for your anecdote about students claiming "the email system ate my homework", as I've grepped through our logs on several occasions by request of faculty members and deans.

Another issue that has hit the school I work at personally is sensitive information being sent via email.

Recently we had a data breach in which sensitive information was sent out the the wrong email addresses. To save (tons) of money we email students their tax forms instead of mailing them.[1] Due to a stupid bug, an application we use that processes the forms sent out the tax forms of hundreds of students to the wrong student.

Because we host student email in-house, we were able to shut down the email system as soon as we found out about the data breach and we were also able to figure out which of the offending emails had been read and which had not. It turned out only a small fraction of the offending emails sent out had been read by anyone (we still notified the people whos data was in an email that wasn't read), which was *slightly* comforting to us.

After all of the findings were double checked and our documentation of the process was complete, we were able to do another thing that control afforded us; we were able to purge the offending emails from the system before opening it back up.

The fact that we had control over all of the systems involved made finding out exactly what happened and minimizing the damage possible. Having this sort of breach with a third party email provider would have made it so more people's information was exposed.

Oh, and by the way - yes, my school's higher ups want to move our student email system to this Microsoft Live program. As you might guess, I'm completely against it, but my opinion doesn't count for much.

[1] Before anyone crys foul over sending sensitive info over email, consider how many hands a piece of snail-mail goes through. After years of getting envelopes delivered to my house with the corners torn open

No forwarding is allowed.

[Anonymous Coward]

I know what university this is commenting about. There is no forwarding allowed due to school policy. see http://www.iwantmypop.com.

Get what you pay for -- free email hosting from MS

[green pizza]

My former university moved all 20,000+ student email accounts to Windows Live Mail as well. The reason? Microsoft offered *free* email and web hosting. Everything from the hosting to the migration to advertising the "great new features" of Windows Live Mail across campus were done at Microsoft's expense. There were lots of complaints, but in the end our IT department was able to free up resources (both servers and employees) thanks to Microsoft's new found generosity. How long this will continue, and how long it will remain free, is yet to be seen. For now it seems to be well supported by MS ads and the whole MS Live marketing campaign.

They're doing the same at my college

[TwoOranges]

At my college they are doing the same (and this is in Belgium, not in the US). Up until recently we could provide our own email address for communication via the Blackboard platform. But for some reason they are now forcing everyone to use a Windows Live account. If I'm not mistaken they'll start using this at the start or the end of this month (I'm not sure, 'cause I lost my letter with all information on my new address and password...)

Free vs Not-Free, webmail vs who-knows-what client

[green pizza]

In many (most? all?) cases, Microsoft is providing university student Windows Live Mail hosing *For Free*. Outsourcing email to Microsoft is a no-brainer to the bean counters and overworked IT departments. Let MS take over the email hosting to free up university resources. Also, having no POP or IMAP support greatly reduces the number of tech support calls to the campus IT helpdesk. "Install IE7, go to the webmail site" vs "here's how to configure eudora/outlook/mail.app/etc for your specific OS version".

It's the University of Idaho

[Angry Rooster]

I'm a student at the University of Idaho, and we just got this notice a few days ago.

Signup by April 15th to be entered into a drawing for one of these prizes:

Microsoft X-Box 360 (one available)
Microsoft Zune MP3 Player (one of two)
Office 2007 Standard Edition (one of four)

Sweet, I could win a copy of Office 2007!

The University of Idaho has partnered with Microsoft to provide enhanced e-mail services for students through the Microsoft Live Mail program. This new VandalMail system provides 2 gigabytes of e-mail storage, full calendaring service, task management, note management, scheduled e-mail reminders and enhanced addressbook control.

How do I setup my new VandalMail account?
Login to the website http://support.uidaho.edu/ with your existing account username and password.
Click on the 'Activate VandalMail Live' menu item.
Follow the instructions to setup your new account.
You will need to migrate your account prior to May 15th to select a personalized e-mail address.

Will anyone be available to assist me with this migration?
Yes, please stop by the ITS Help Desk in Administration room 133 or the Sub and Library computer labs and talk with a Technical Service Representative, they are ready to assist you. You can also reach us by phone at 208-885-HELP (4357).

Will I have a new e-mail address? What happens to my old e-mail address?
You will have a new @vandals.uidaho.edu e-mail address which you can personalize. Your existing @uidaho.edu address will be setup to automatically forward e-mail to @vandals.uidaho.edu until 2008.

Where can I read more about this new service and how to migrate?
Please visit the web page http://support.uidaho.edu/live/.

Oh, and even though this e-mail would seem to indicate optional participation, the support page clears that up:

Will I be required to use VandalMail Live?
All students are required to move to the new system. This transfer process is mandatory, but if you have problems, ITS will be here to assist you. Please remember that you must create an account by May 15th or your existing @uidaho.edu account will be upgraded.

What really upsets me is that Gmail finally allows outside POP retrieval, so I finally thought I'd be free of their stupid web interface.(Honestly, when you look at a message, pressing the back button logs you out) Now I find out we're being "upgraded" to a Microsoft web system which apparently will have problems loading on low end computers.

What can I do if my computer has difficulty loading Windows Live E-mail?
There is a light (classic) version available. This can be changed by logging into VandalMail Live and accessing the options page. By switching to the light (classic) version, users can turn off some of the features of Live, but still retains all essential e-mail functions. You can also install Windows Live Mail Desktop on your computer. Note: If the light (classic) version is being used, neither the color themes nor the different reading panes will be available.

Ugh. At least I know the faculty is just as inconvenienced as we are. None of my professors are going to enjoy the lack of POP3.

- Angry Rooster

Re:It's the University of Idaho

[coyotecult]

Ugh. At least I know the faculty is just as inconvenienced as we are. None of my professors are going to enjoy the lack of POP3.

That might not be true--the staff and faculty are being moved to an MS Exchange server, not Windows Live Mail, and MS Exchange supports POP if set up properly (to my understanding). In any case, they're not going to be on WLM. It's only student emails being migrated.

Re:It's the University of Idaho

[Angry Rooster]

Arg. My slight glimmer of comfort, torn away! I really wish they'd just let us add our own external e-mail address for official contact. Oh well, guess I'll go back to logging into a horrible web interface to see if my classes have been cancelled each morning. - Angry Rooster

I see 2 problems

[nurb432]

1 - relying on a *beta* product ( what, are they nuts? )
2 - relying on a proprietary product ( schools should teach choice, and encourage experimentation. This is counter productive )

Re:I see 2 problems

[Tyrven]

"schools should teach choice, and encourage experimentation"

That's idealistic at best and more likely just plain naive. In my experience, professors are usually about preaching their individual philosophies on their young, malleable students. Especially in the liberal arts schools. I'm familiar with the ideal you're talking about but it's implemented just about as well as the idea of "Life, Liberty and Happiness" is in the average modern day Democracy.

Not saying people should ask for more, continue to demand more. But let's be realistic about who we're talking about here.

Re:I see 2 problems

[nurb432]

I did say *should*.. I've been thru the college mill decades ago so i know how it actually works. But i can always wish for better.

Arizona State University

[dorath]

Arizona State University is moving around 65,000 students to Google Apps for Education.

2GB of mail storage, chat, calendar, colaboration, and not locked into Windows.

Webmail for Thunderbird

[3choTh1s]

Seriously... http://webmail.mozdev.org/ Webmail for Thunderbird is the way to go. I have a Live Mail account plus Yahoo Mail and Gmail. Having access to all my accounts from one place with all the abilities of a full desktop client is fantastic. I use it on OS X machine as well as my XP and Mandriva machines and they all work exactly alike so I know what I'm getting to when I move to a different machine. And with the other extensions available it really is my perfect client. ~3cho

Re:Webmail for Thunderbird

[Anonymous Coward]

On that webpage they could not spell Mozilla :-)

Its all about money

[Monoman]

Upper management has already made the decision for us to do the same thing. They chose MS Live Mail for a few reasons.

1. It is free. To do it ourselves would be expensive when you start looking at the HW requirements.
2. No ads for current students. Once they become alumni MS will put ads in their stuff.
3. When the decision was made, Google supposedly wanted 10K a year. Now its free I think.
4. Colleges want student email so they can eliminate paper communications (save on postage) for "official" communications.

MS is trying to build up their Live Mail user base so they can afford to give it away to schools for now.

I am no fan of student email or going with the MS solution but it wasn't my decision to make. I can think of worse solutions.

Re:Its all about money

[coyotecult]

Thank you very much!

Once they become alumni MS will put ads in their stuff.

This is an aspect I hadn't heard about yet. I will make sure to ask our ITS department about it. I do know that after 180 days of inactivity, (unread?) mail is deleted from the inbox. While that's probably not an issue for students, I think it might be alumni, especially because mail forwarding is not currently allowed.

Re:Its all about money

[Utopia]

Ads can be disabled in the UI of windows mail desktop.
By default it is on.

Re:Its all about money

[coyotecult]

That would be really great news! Could you tell me how to do that? I'd really love to tell people about that. Thanks!

Re:Its all about money

[Yartrebo]

"4. Colleges want student email so they can eliminate paper communications (save on postage) for "official" communications."

Considering how rarely I check e-mail (about once a month - and it's a big task considering how much junk piles up in that time), I sure hope they don't send anything time-sensitive via that. It could be over a month before I read it, and then there's a chance that I'll miss it after that 1000th junk e-mail.

The only reason I even use an e-mail account at all is that it's needed by a lot of websites for registration and blogs to post, which is probably where that junk comes from in the first place.

Re:Its all about money

[flanderz]

Yes, Google have stated that Apps for Domain will always be free for education.

Re:Its all about money

[Achromatic1978]

I sure hope they don't send anything time-sensitive via that. It could be over a month before I read it

So they're informing you that communications will come by this system, and your choice is to only check it once a month or so, and ready yourself with snarkiness in the event that your lax mail checking schedule means you miss something time-critical?

Would you bitch the same if you decided most of your snail mail was junk so from now on you were only going to check it every month or so, too?

Re:Its all about money

[Yartrebo]

What do you do when you go on vacation? Snail mail can be left for a week or two, and there shouldn't be any problems. If your bills are pre-paid, as I've seen people do when they go on very long vacations, then it can be left to pile up at the Post Office for even longer.

My issue with e-mail (and snail mail) is that advertising can get me very angry. I don't like to be reminded about it too often. If my e-mail inbox didn't have ads in it, then I wouldn't mind checking it every time I log on.

No, worse than not providing email.

[twitter]

Just open a gmail account, forward e-mail from Windows Live and use the free POP.

They won't let you, so you are forced to use something that can use Windows Live or miss out on University communications.

Even LSU had enough sense to outsource to a mail service that had POP and IMAP and works with kmail. Why does it work with kmail? Because the service is based on free software and coded to REAL STANDARDS, not some M$ crap d'jour.

Re:No, worse than not providing email.

[xSauronx]

i know that cant be "LightSpeed University" but i got internet access as a teenager and that was the first thing that entered my mind when i saw LSU

Re:No, worse than not providing email.

[SheeEttin]

M$ crap d'jour

*absconds with phrase*

Common Problem: Common Solution.

[crhylove]

Those kids are going to have to do the same thing I had to do at a job where their email setup sucked:

Use some other email address. I mean, there are tons of free ones with POP and etc..

If the university that you're paying to attend doesn't offer decent email, maybe you should consider a different university to give your money to....

rhY

Re:Common Problem: Common Solution.

[Tyrven]

That's a really good point. "Well, yes, I am aware that the school I went to doesn't have a good reputation and, in point of fact, I didn't actually learn all that much while I was there. But I want you to know that they had really awesome email services!"

You're paying $10K+USD/Year for school. Yeah, it'd be nice if that came with a solid email package but if it doesn't just get a free gmail account.

If you changed schools every time a school did something stupid, you might as well save yourself a lot of time and just stop pursuing your education. Honestly.

Re:Common Problem: Common Solution.

[crhylove]

Well, at least for technology minded types (The common /. ilk, no?!?), not having a reasonably well thought out email program DOES indicate some difficulties in the tech department of a university, and hence, the average /. student MIGHT be better off at a university that has reasonable email.

Not just for the email, but for the other (very likely) problems that would arise based on the administrations fairly glaring technological ignorance.

I mean, imagine what kind of online classes are available at a school that is completely dependent on Windows Live Mail....

They're probably horrifically shoddy at best....

rhY

Re:Common Problem: Common Solution.

[Tyrven]

One would think. Although I've been surprised by how many technology firms I've worked with (for example) that have pretty decent products and yet just terrible IT departments. Often, it seems, this is a product of two factors: 1, inside a technology firm, IT is often not seen as the prestigious career path, and 2, often IT ignorance is compensated by technically minded staff. I've worked with several software firms, for instance, where the IT department was essentially there for the marketing folks; the developers all ran their own mail servers because they preferred more control over the technology.

Although obviously this varies with each institution. I definitely see your point.

Re:Common Problem: Common Solution.

[coyotecult]

Unfortunately, like I mention in the article's text, that would be a feasible solution if we were allowed to forward our email or register our own emails for our University email. However, official University email must go to our University emails, and it cannot be forwarded to an account of our choice. It is built in with a lot of the classroom systems so that the teacher automatically sends emails to the students' University emails for important information about classes. I have lots of emails, more than I need--but all of them, except for the throwaway Hotmail I keep to shove at businesses who want an email for no good reason, are hooked up to my mail client.

Re:Get what you pay for -- free email hosting from

[coyotecult]

Our switch wasn't cost free--we had an article in our school newspaper about the finances of the deal. We do, however, save quite a penny in the long run as compared to what we have now, which is very understandable in the face of our budget woes. Still, the cost for running a basic service like email don't seem very exhorbiant compared to other things student fees have been spent on, like Palousafest 2006, which the university radio reported cost $20,000.

I'm going to call this "CIO Syndrome"

[david.emery]

Defined as the CIO making decisions that make his/her life easier, that have substantial negative consequences on the user community.

But those users and their impacts don't come out of the CIO's budget, so they don't count.

Has anyone ever met a CIO who didn't have "CIO Syndrome"?

            dave

ugh.

[Anonymous Coward]

Our college [around 2500 people] sent out a survey to ask what we think of the switch to windows live.

In the "additional comments" box at the end of the survey, I told the IT people that RangerMail [our uni. email system] sucks, but Microsoft mail would be a 100 times worse.

I'm not too bothered either way I guess, as I only use my rangermail account for school things. We have next to no storage, shitty service, and half the time the service "eats" messages--a bad thing, because most of the time they're important. Like, for example, the one that told us when housing applications for next year were due. No one got the message, so everyone turned in their housing late, which pissed off the housing people.

I'd rather not use RangerMail OR Windows Live...but I'll live.

Outsourcing email doesn't make any sense

[Arrogant-Bastard]

For starters, it's quite easy to run a secure, high-performance,
scalable mail system using open-source tools on cheap hardware.
An *example* of such a combination might be: OpenBSD, postfix,
SpamAssassin, CLamAV, UW-IMAP, perdition. This combination
supports secure POP and IMAP, along with mail submission via
SSL and TLS, thus accomodating horribly broken clients like Outlook.
Building a cluster of such systems (to distribute load and provide
fault-tolerance) is a well-understood exercise.

Second, any solution which does not support Internet standard
protocols like POP and IMAP may be rejected immediately. It's
far too silly to merit serious consideration.

Third, there are some very troubling questions here concerning:
- security
- privacy
- data retention
- data repurposing
- academic integrity
For example, we have seen a series of serious security problems
at MSN/Hotmail; there is no reason to believe that any other service
operated by Microsoft will be unblemished. We have seen disturbing
policy changes at Google in re their data retention. We have seen
privacy issues at Yahoo. And so on. My point being that none of these
services have providing convincing proof that they can operate at
a level acceptable for professional use.

Moreover, entangling a university's computing infrastructure with
a commercial organization's raises questions of academic integrity:
which is why having the mail system operated by the university's
own professional staff (who are under the university's authority)
seems necessary to me in order to exert an acceptable level of control.

I find this news very disconcerting; even more so when I read that
others report that their institutions are considering similar moves.
While it may be attractive financially (although I would be perfectly
to bet that I could implement an in-house solution that's cheaper),
this is not something that should be scrimped on. Faculty, staff,
and student communications are too important to be delegated
to the lowest bidder.

Re:Outsourcing email doesn't make any sense

[ionpro]

It's a hell of a lot more expensive then free. I have no idea how big this school is, but my school has 6k undergrads, 10k grad+undergrad, and 25k overall (including the medical center). To provide spam filtering for our users, virus scanning, and mail delivery, it requires something on the order of 50 servers -- well over half running open source tools on Solaris boxes, the remaining 30% or so Win2k3/Exchange. Educational e-mail is very high volume: we deliver well over three million messages per month, and spam filter out another 30 million. We do provide IMAP access, but we only provide 100MB of quota space, and our webmail, quite frankly, sucks.

I wish that we had outsourced to someone who knew what they were doing. Even outsourcing to Google would provide us with decent webmail and POP access. The idea here is to move over to Exchange for all of our accounts eventually, which no one objects to -- Exchange supports all the standard protocols for those who don't want to use Microsoft, and Outlook Web Access is a pretty nice web client (even in standard mode in Firefox).

Re:Outsourcing email doesn't make any sense

[coleridge78]

The university I work for has over 70k active users. It delivers over three million messages a week and turns away four times that in spam.

We also run mostly free tools on Solaris hardware.

For all email services, including a pretty good webmail, a box for "premium" ie shell accounts, smtp, and an internal-only relay service, we use 21 machines. We provide and encourage IMAP, basically unlimited inbox and 2GB other storage (including IMAP folders).

It certainly isn't free by any means, but it's extremely reliable, open, and feature-rich. I'm not sure why it would take 50 servers for the type and scale of service you've described, unless they're older machines like X1s or 210s.

Re:Outsourcing email doesn't make any sense

[ionpro]

Sounds like our volumes are comparable. And they are older machines. We're currently upgrading to virtualized servers running on newer Sun Opteron/Linux boxes, but the web servers moved first, as they were way, way out of lifecycle (one was 15 years old).

Re:Outsourcing email doesn't make any sense

[ionpro]

Oh, I forgot to mention, that number includes three datacenters, any one of which can (theoretically) handle the entire load. I have my doubts, but...

Re:Outsourcing email doesn't make any sense

[coleridge78]

Ah, gotcha. Makes more sense.

Re:Outsourcing email doesn't make any sense

[coyotecult]

You can read about our last setup, which didn't work out so well.

Re:Outsourcing email doesn't make any sense

[coleridge78]

That article didn't say anything about what the last setup actually was, only that it apparently took a lot of effort to keep running, and an attempt by ITS to blame that on Sun. Like I said, we use Sun hardware for 70k+ users, as do many, many other universities and businesses, and I've never heard of particular issues with it beyond the usual sorts of things. It certainly has fewer problems than any Exchange deployment I've known of. The article you linked to has all the hallmarks of a boneheaded puff piece, as is pointed out in the comments to it.

Re:Outsourcing email doesn't make any sense

[coyotecult]

It wasn't the hardware they were talking about as much as the SunOne software they were using, if that helps.

Re:Outsourcing email doesn't make any sense

[coleridge78]

Ah. In that case, I have no idea. Don't use it, am not familiar with anyone who does. I do know that switching from one "we'll do everything you need!" solution to another rarely solves your problem, which is probably not in the implementation, but the concept. :) It may take a little more research, but at the end of the day, if you really don't have the resources to pull it together yourself, at least get your email from someone who understands email, and etc.

Vendor Neutrality? Brain Dead!

[twitter]

please note the vendor neutrality, here

You mean forget everything I know? No way! Even if I thought outsourcing email was a good idea, M$ is the last group I'd trust. I don't, but I can say that LSU's outsourced email works.

Re:Free vs Not-Free, webmail vs who-knows-what cli

[Anonymous Coward]

That's fine for the private sector - actually it's not, even there. But should a criminal corporation really get to set foot that way in education? How is that not reinforcing the point that they're a criminal monopoly?

File a discrimination suit Mac Users!

[misterhypno]

If you are a graphic arts student, let the administration know that you are required to use a Mac and that there IS NO such product for YOUR computer. Then file a discrimination case against the university.

Watch just how quickly they fall back to a more universal email system...!

Lee Darrow, C.H.
(and yes, Clarence Darrow IS my cousin!)

Re:File a discrimination suit Mac Users!

[Anonymous Coward]

Being a Mac user isn't a protected class. I don't know where you got that idea.

Re:File a discrimination suit Mac Users!

[Ash-Fox]

I thought you could check windows live mail from Safari?

Re:File a discrimination suit Mac Users!

[Achromatic1978]

Clarence Darrow was born in 1857. If we were to assume his father Amirus Darrow, fathered him at the age of 18, his father was born in 1839. Let's say Amirus's father fathered children over the course of 50 years, then Clarence's "youngest" uncle or aunt would have been born in 1889. This uncle or aunt of course being one of your parents. Which would make you at least 50, esp. considering the portraits on your website. Completely possible, sure...

... if you were born at your fathers 66th birthday. And your father was the youngest of a family whose oldest son was born 50 years before him.

That seems unlikely.

Unless I'm missing something obvious?

Re:File a discrimination suit Mac Users!

[Ash-Fox]

Apparently mentioning a fact the parent poster didn't seem to know about is 'overrated' now.

Re:File a discrimination suit Mac Users!

[Anonymous Coward]

You missed the "removed" part, or I didn't type it in - I haven't had time to look. Sorry.

And Clarence's my cousin, not my uncle. If you go to a removed situation of once removed, or even twice removed, then it is completely possible. And I will be 55 in less than 3 weeks.

No Forwarding?

[lexarius]

My university has recently disabled forwarding of university mail to outside mail servers. This was because much of the mail coming from school organizations is spam-like and enough students were marking it as spam that some popular mail services were dumping important university mail to spam folders.

However, the forwarding ban was only for *external* mail servers. Other mail servers within the school's domain were OK. So I forwarded my university mail to the Computer Science Department's internal mail servers, and dropped a .forward in my home directory that pointed to where I really wanted all my mail to go (gmail).

Re:No Forwarding?

[coyotecult]

I'm not in the CS department anymore, but they phased out the internal email system for CS students a while ago, keeping it only for faculty, since all students had a University provided email anyway. I don't know how many other departments might have internal mail.

Re:Boo Hoo

[coyotecult]

The concerns about malware are fringe and would be a non-issue (for me) entirely if we could use our regular clients and people had the option to use another desktop client. Our ITS department is always very pro-active about security, with regular emails encouraging people to try and secure their computers.

As for your slurs towards my personal affairs, I'm not running Linux right now, although in the future I'm planning to get back into that titillating groove, and I live in an apartment, 'cause I like cooking my own food and keeping pets.

Get Alumni Involved

[pat_trick]

The suggestion to write to / write an article for the university newspaper is a good one.

Another good one is to get in touch with Alumni. If you can contact any of the technically minded ones, get them involved. Nothing hurts a university more than uproar from Alumni who are perspective donors.

Re:Get Alumni Involved

[sordit]

Good idea.
I also think that a lot of our physics and computer science Profs would go to the barricades if they were kind of forced to work with Windows. Most of them are using Linux and are presumably not willing to check their mails via a web-mailer interface. Changing the OS would be also out of question for them as they all have their specific software they've been using for half of the lifes or even have large projects with years of planning running under a non Microsoft OS.
But well.. if you're on a non natural / computer science University you're probably doomed.

Investigate the decision maker ....

[Anonymous Coward]

Look into the bank account of whoever it is made this decision. Maybe you might find out why.

Using Windows Mail for Uni - BAD

[Anonymous Coward]

That's such a bad idea! I am an IT Technician of a small (500 students) all girls senior College. If I were to have the email off-site I would only choose GMail. Having emails off-site would make it some what easier for me as I don't have to worry about backups, spam, etc.. but it would still be a hassle signing up each student, at least internally I have it automatically create the accounts and authenticate through LDAP to our Active Directory.

IMAP vs POP: Folders vs Flags; threading

[Anonymous Coward]

IMAP does support "flags" (customizable labels). I don't believe that POP does this. Furthermore, an extension to IMAP has enabled virtual folders, which would mean that flags could be transcribed to folders if desired.

Another IMAP extension does support message threading & I'm unaware of a similar POP spec.

So, IMAP access would be able to preserve more gmail features than POP!

Re:IMAP vs POP: Folders vs Flags; threading

[mrchaotica]

I just wish Google would add an "x-google-labels" header to messages downloaded with POP, so that I could sort them into Mail.app Smart Folders (or whatever the Thunderbird equivalent is called). And yes, IMAP would be nice too.

forced to buy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are the students really forced to buy MS products? At my school (Embry-Riddle, Daytona campus) they gave all Microsoft products away for free. By gave away for free, I mean you had to check them out at the library. My first two years they actually gave disks away, but that must have been too expensive. I know they also got great deals on engineering software for the labs. Maybe his school has a similar deal, so he wouldn't really be forced to buy anything.

change schools

[alizard]

Ugly solution, but so's getting a bunch of Fs in courses where you did adequate or better work simply because MS products ate your incoming or outgoing mail.

Especially if your major is an IT-related field.

that's not outsourcing

[oohshiny]

Google and Microsoft will advertise if you don't pay them, as well they should. Getting a free service from a company isn't "outsourcing".

Outsourcing means you pay market rates for the service. Then, your students won't be subjected to advertising.

(As an aside, the ads are easy to kill.)

Re:that's not outsourcing

[Gerzel]

Its exactly like paying for Cable over getting the signal over the air!

Pay for Cable and you don't get any ads...

Re:that's not outsourcing

[killerdark]

(As an aside, the ads are easy to kill.)
Ads? What ads?

A contrary opinion... I think.

[rickb928]

Welcome to the world of SOA.

Windows Live Mail might be e-mail, but it's a service. The rules change.

In an SOA world, you don't get a mail server. You get a mail service.

You don't get POP, SMTP, or IMAP. You get your mail.

You use the service. That's the 'S' part. You don't get to choose the underpinnings of the service either. If you want control, get yer own service.

I can see why WLM is attractive to lots of universities and large organizations:

- No caring for Exchange servers, which is a royal pain. Just keeping them up is sometimes a joy. And someone asking for deleted messages to be restored makes your day a weekend.

- If you haven't used scalable, manageable, reliable mail servers, you're looking for a way out.

- User administration is so much easier if you let the service tie into your systems, or send over a flat file with the account info, or just let people sign up with a secret code. No dealing with the ID10T errors. Well, not much. Uh, maybe just not too much more.

- Pricing can be atrractive, especially for students. 3 bucks a head a month, hey, just tack in onto the Activities Fee. Paid for. Nice.

Now, I'd rather have mail I can forward out of my institutional account into my 'personal' account too. I figure as a student that some day I will either graduate, screw up, or forget to pay a bill, and *poof*, years of mail gone. Crap. But let's also admit to something. Maybe these organizations are figuring that they spend a fair amount of $ for email systems that mostly go for personal messages of students on the 7-year plan. Let them find an account elsewhere.

Yep, if you need to correspond with someone via your 'official' school account, you're stuck with it. But it was never as simple as signing up and letting the school bear the costs.

I kinda hope they don't jack up tuition too much tho. WLM isn't worth it.

Just my opinion. If the school wanted to save money and get better mail they coulda used GroupWise, or even better Postfix. Maybe dbMail. But none of those alternatives would ingratiate them with Microsoft, or earn a bigger discount on other products.

Darn.

-rick

Re:A contrary opinion... I think.

[coyotecult]

No caring for Exchange servers, which is a royal pain.

Haha, actually, they're migrating the faculty/staff to MS Exchange servers, now that you mention it.

I kinda hope they don't jack up tuition too much tho. WLM isn't worth it.

WLM is cheaper than the past system, so that probably won't happen. It's one of its benefits that need to be considered beside the negatives. Although I'd note that $3 a head a month is more than double what we were paying for the old system.

It would be great if that were the case

[Infonaut]

As with any project, you have to determine the specific requirements before you can even THINK of looking at vendors.

In my experience, the larger the project and the more vested the IT department is in a particular vendor, the less likely your eminently sensible guidelines will be followed.

I truly wish more people with your degree of rationality managed IT departments.

Re:Issue is not about in/out sourcing or vendor lo

[coleridge78]

You are right that the university taking kickbacks to let corps pimp to their students is antithetical to everything university should be about, but sadly, that battle was lost long ago and will not be revisited. From credit-card giveaways to Aramark in the dining hall to Coke everywhere to MS license deals and their posters all over campus, it's over.

why treat email as more critical than snail mail?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have yet to see a university give all students an on-campus snail mail address and insist students use it to receive all official college correspondence.

So why should an email be so special?

change schools

[AngryNick]

Like free mail services, there are also plenty of universities out there that aren't out to stifle thought or limit your learning experience. Any school that forces you to use a crappy mail service is probably screwing with you in other ways too.

Re:fuck off

[coyotecult]

Even that wouldn't solve everyone's problem--people are asking how to set up this account with their Outlook and they can't, even though both Windows Live Mail and Outlook are Microsoft products and they're on a Windows system.

95 % of yankdot retards use and love M$

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck you

this program will help you

[rossko]

http://webmail.mozdev.org/index.html its a plugin that allows webmail to be used in thunderbird since you said you werent using windows i guess that it would be linux and well thunderbird as an option give it a go, ive never used it but i know people who have :D

Re:Get what you pay for -- free email hosting from

[bendodge]

Gmail Gmail Gmail
Free, huge storage, POP3, all kinds of rules you can make, excellent SPAM filtering (way better than MSN), and Google has another service that offers free web hosting.

A new feature being gradually implemented (I think be seniority) is the ability to check other POP3 accounts from Gmail. Gmail also has the best AJAX interface in existence, IMHO.

At my college

[Shinra]

I'm currently attending Collins College, based in Tempe, AZ.

For our email system, the college opted to go with a web-based outlook,
which in my opinion is fine because it doesn't require having a certain
kind of computer or operating system, and it works in all major browsers (To my knowelege).

See since its about a rouble 50/50 (Could be 60/40 or 40/60, but all around fairly evenly divided)
ratio between students on Powerbooks and students on Laptops, the college has to allow all of the
students equal access to the email system. While its certainly not
my only email address, its useful for getting updates on assignments from teachers as well
as sending in assignments (Although the teacher usually just passes around a USB stick).

My recommendation is to drop the whole Live-thing. I'm fairly non-platform when it comes to
Mac or PC (Both have their places), but requiring that students adhere to a certain platform because
the corporation is being paid extra 'donations' by Microsoft is not the proper way to go. This
would be the same if the school had switched over to Apple. Now the big question is: Does this
place have an active placement of Macs or PCs, because if it were INTENTIONALLY directed towards
PCs/Laptops, then the Live Hotmail thing might be more understandable.

As for a replacement? I'd say either a centralized Linux-Server dedicated towards the email system
(Separate from the servers for http/ftp usage), or as my college did, have the email system online,
with a client-server setup.

The biggest problem with their setup is of course no support for regular standards of email (POP3, etc.,),
which is surprising for an educational institution. That is why I suggested that maybe Microsoft is paying
extra 'donations' so that their new Live thing gets more users, and by extension, more market share.

Re:At my college

[coyotecult]

As far as I know, all operating systems can check their mail, but only using the web mail client. Desktop clients besides Windows Live Mail Desktop aren't supported, because Windows Live doesn't support POP, although there seem to be some Thunderbird extensions that get around this. However, I suspect they could be liable to break at any time if Microsoft changes the system; people can't rely on them to work. And, some people don't use Thunderbird for their client.

Does this place have an active placement of Macs or PCs

Both: both PCs and Macs are sold in the campus bookstore, which is an authorized Apple dealer. Their VMobile program leases both PC and Mac computers. Some departments, like the Biology department, are very Mac-oriented.

A Note on ... Going Beta at the Univ.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's all about M$ feeding $$$ to the Univ. Pres., Board, Provosts ... etc.....

Requiring the Univ. Pres., Board, Provosts ... etc. to make available their
bank accounts to review, at random and at the discression of the FBI,
only shifts the "payout" to cash, bundles of cocaine, and prostitutes
(male ... since the Board, Regents, and President are Gay Males) as
well as S.B. and B.G. (they get along together in such sweet ways in
the cubicle ... so touching).

Toodles

This is extremely important

[dangitman]

If access is only available to a specific platform, we might not be able to get a critical tip-off about potato blight in Idaho. Therefore, potatoes might not be available to make McDonalds Freedom Fries. Therefore, the US economy will collapse.

Don't mess with Idaho.

Make them liable

[revengance]

There should be laws making organisations liable for any damage on our own computers due to their insistence of us using certain software to access their sites. For example, if a banking site required IE6 and our computer is compromised as a result of using IE6 while using their website, the bank should compensate us. Similar if we are using linux and have to switch to windows to use IE to access their website, and the windows is compromise, the bank should similarly compensate us.

Sounds lovely.

[Kadin2048]

When I was at uni all our e-mail was on a VMS system and I had to actually go onto the campus site and access it through a VT100 terminal. If I wanted to read my e-mail at home I had take it home on paper after printing it out on a dot matrix line printer that normally had about 2 days worth of jobs queued up ahead of me.

I'm not sure how many weeks of having to check my email through a communal Windows box in some campus library it would take me to be pining for a VT100, but I bet it wouldn't be a lot.

Dumb terminals were dumb, but to be frank I'd take them every day over some spyware-ridden econo-box PC. At least with the VT100, you know all your data is tucked away on a machine that was probably designed with some modicum of intelligence and forethought, and running an OS that doesn't have to be restored from a bare-metal image on a regular basis just to stay usable, as most multi-user Windows kiosks do.

And besides which, most places running mainframes that I worked at, usually had a modem bank around somewhere that you could dial into, if you knew the right person to ask and what kind of beer they preferred.

I'd take my email through a text-based console and like it, before I'd submit to this "Windows Live Messenger" garbage.

Re:Get what you pay for -- free email hosting from

[level_headed_midwest]

My university (University of Missouri-Columbia) is thinking about doing this also, but thankfully is using it as a pilot program with about 65 students to gauge feedback before it would be done campus-wide. I happened to be one that enrolled in it to test it out. The Live Mail is rather rough around the edges and drops a lot of widely-used features of the current Exchange system, such as automatic e-mail address lookup, calendars, and e-mail client access.

Preliminary results from users like me were pretty negative, so IATS put this on hold for the time being. Will they eventually switch? Maybe- and I hope not. It is a pretty awful system, especially for those who like to use e-mail clients and not just webmail. I'm doing what I can to try and stop this, and I hope that I am successful.

Re:Get what you pay for -- free email hosting from

[MsGeek]

Woodbury University migrated its student accounts to Gmail. Very happy about it. Nice to apply Gmail's industrial-strength, nearly infallable Spam filters to my account.

Who needs freaking MS and their "Live*" crap? Apparently not the IT department, whose natural instinct would have been to pile on more MS junk but they went the Gmail route because whatever solution they picked would have had to work on the Macs at WU too.

The Googleplex has made recent decisions I would have to categorize as "evil." However, I cannot argue with the fact that their stuff just WORKS, period. I for one welcome our Googleplex overlords. However I wish they'd grow more of a spine in dealing with Big Media. :P

I call bull$#*!

[The Second Horseman]

I am not a lawyer. But I do work in higher ed, in IT, and this comes up a lot. I call it "FERPES" - in it's worst form, a malady that causes one to believe FERPA entitles college students to go to school but still be "off the grid" like they were living in a crazy shack in Montana with no utilities and no address. FERPA basically covers two things 1) personal information (not directory info) and 2) academic information like grades. Directory information can be given to anyone - the University just has to have a policy saying under what circumstances it can be shared and with whom, and what constitutes directory information. FERPA requires that we have a policy - it does NOT dictate what that policy has to be. Things like name, email address, etc. can be listed. Student email, stored on a system paid for or contracted for by the University are likely NOT student records - it's not grades. In fact, on a system belonging to the University, it's likely the property of the school. Or the state, if it's a public institution. And, by the way, FERPA doesn't actually prohibit anyone working for the University who has any thin excuse to see the information from doing so, including consultants and contractors. Yes, the liability isn't transferred, but the authority is. I realize that some schools have taken the extreme position that students have to be treated like they're all in the witness protection program, but it's not true. As a side note, the financial penalties are almost a non-issue - STUDENTS CANNOT SUE UNDER FERPA. The law doesn't allow it, and that's been upheld in court. Students have NO STANDING to sue. The Department of Education can fine an institution, but that's so rare it might as well be a Bigfoot sighting. FERPA is toothless. Some states may have laws that extend additional protection to students, but that's not FERPA.

Re:I call bull$#*!

[coleridge78]

Directory information can be given to anyone - the University just has to have a policy saying under what circumstances it can be shared and with whom, and what constitutes directory information. FERPA requires that we have a policy - it does NOT dictate what that policy has to be.

Wrong. You cannot have a policy that course attendance is "directory information". There is a narrow type of information that can be considered directory info, and it is not a matter left to the University's discretion in the direction of inclusion. None of it can relate in any way to specific course enrollment, coursework or outcomes (other than honors designations and awards). Additionally, the University has no discretion on opt-out policy, which is mandatory and the opt-out a complete ban on standard directory info release.

Student email, stored on a system paid for or contracted for by the University are likely NOT student records - it's not grades. In fact, on a system belonging to the University, it's likely the property of the school.

Wrong on all counts.

It is quite explicit that "student records" encompasses anything relating to the student's studies, not just grades. Emails about classes are most definitely covered; personal emails on a school account are not. And unless a University claims such by policy (which I have not seen anywhere, probably because it would be exceedingly likely to defend it in court), that data is not the property of the University no matter who maintains the system on which it resides.

And, by the way, FERPA doesn't actually prohibit anyone working for the University who has any thin excuse to see the information from doing so, including consultants and contractors. Yes, the liability isn't transferred, but the authority is.

Wrong. FERPA enumerates the allowed uses and users of "student records" and while it's vague in some areas this isn't one of them. There is absolutely nothing that could be construed as allowing anyone not employed by either the institution or the government access to such records without signed approval of the student.

I also didn't say that enforcement action would be terribly likely, I said it was a possibility. It's been demonstrated, in these days of "ID theft" hysteria, that the feds are looking for whipping boys on this stuff and if some school were to have a breach involving giving out student info to a bunch of god-knows-whos who turn around and leak it or sell it, you can bet there would be enforcement forthcoming.

You also err in that, while SCOTUS has ruled that there is no right to private action under FERPA, FERPA is still quite a useful guideline as to the sort of release which is likely to be actionable on other bases. If a release is explicitly protected under FERPA, it's unlikely that it will be found to be a violation of any privacy contract between the student and the school, torts of defamation, or etc. For example, in the case in which SCOTUS ruled as noted above the plaintiff still walked away with nearly a million dollars under other statutes for the same release. Yes, in this case it's "not FERPA" as you said, but it's still quite a useful guideline for "here's where we're safe".

There are other problems with what you've written, but this is already long enough. Having said all this, I agree that there is a lot of misunderstanding, and overestimating, of FERPA. But it's certainly not something that should prudently be ignored, as you seem to suggest.

Who modded that informative?

[electrosoccertux]

Seems like my POP access can delete the e-mail just fine. Maybe on your computer, but that doesn't delete it from the server as well.

Re:Who modded that informative?

[Bwian_of_Nazareth]

Really? And what does the "DELE" command of POP3 protocol do then? POP3 is perfectly capable of deleting email on server. (And to be pedanting, POP3 most certainly cannot delete emails on your computer, that is not something POP3 enters into.)

Re:Who modded that informative?

[jonbryce]

It flags the email as not to be presented to pop3 clients again, but leaves it on the server. I think it also marks the mail as read.

Re:Who modded that informative?

[Bwian_of_Nazareth]

From the RFC1939:
The POP3 server marks the message as deleted. Any future reference to the message-number associated with the message in a POP3 command generates an error. The POP3 server does not actually delete the message until the POP3 session enters the UPDATE state.
When the client issues the QUIT command from the TRANSACTION state, the POP3 session enters the UPDATE state.

Re:Who modded that informative?

[ady1]

It does actually delete it off the server (if you want it to).

Forwarding and POP->Enable POP for all mail->2. When messages are accessed with POP->delete Gmail's copy

Re:Get what you pay for -- free email hosting from

[assassinator42]

I agree, switching to gmail for university email doesn't sound that bad. Especially if it would raise the storage limit from 20 MB to >2GB. I don't really care though, I almost never use my university email as I have all of my class email sent to my Yahoo/SBC account.

Re:why treat email as more critical than snail mai

[Anonymous Coward]

I have yet to see a university give all students an on-campus snail mail address and insist students use it to receive all official college correspondence.

My school had its own post office. Every student was assigned a box. It was trivial and cheap for the school to distribute mail within its own post office so that's where all correspondence went (barring of course mail sent while classes were not in session). The school did not make exceptions for students living off campus (more than 90% of students lived on campus anyway).

The old geezer that I am, I can't tell you what the current policy is on email. When I went there, email was optional. Students did not get an email account unless they went to Information Services and asked for one. At that time most people in the real world had never heard of email.

Outsourcing

[Anonymous Coward]

My University currently has an e-mail system that is either IMAP or webmail. They do, however, let you forward it.

It has actually been suggested to the Information Technology department that they look at outsourcing to Gmail because the Gmail interface and functionality is WAY better than the current webmail. Plus, even outsourced, you could still forward.

Re:Get what you pay for -- free email hosting from

[typan]

but - in five years when the deal expires and microsoft has locked everything in as much as possible - what is the cost to switch out of it? i will bet that microsoft will draw up a new contract - paid this time - which will be less than the cost of full migration. then, in another five years, when - presumably - everyone is really locked in like they are with office - what will that contract cost?

fifteen years (or so) and they have a new strangle-hold, no? (at least in their minds; i think things innovate too fast these days for this style to effectively work - it was a great 1980s move for them, obviously.)

Re:Get what you pay for -- free email hosting from

[mutende]

I agree, switching to gmail for university email doesn't sound that bad. Especially if it would raise the storage limit from 20 MB to >2GB.

The Windows Live Mail in question also offers 2 GB storage. The presentation says:

Store More
Students, faculty and alumni can store it all with a 2 GB inbox (Hotmail accounts, which schools currently start with, provide 250 Mb).

School Email Accounts

[im_thatoneguy]

Who the hell uses their school email account?

Re:School Email Accounts

[Anonymous Coward]

Students?

Re:School Email Accounts

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you?

Just use separate email account

[adrenaline_junky]

On one hand I think it is horrible for universities to lock their students into an email system like this, but on the other hand I don't see it as that big of a deal. Just use a separate email system for your personal correspondence.

You don't have a choice of email system when you get out into the real world either... you are stuck using something compatible with whatever your company gives you. If you have a more liberal company then you may have various options open to you, but very security conscious companies have extremely draconian email systems and policies.

I always tell people to send me personal emails at my personal email address. It protects my privacy, and it also protects the company. I always *assume* that my manager may be peeking into to my company inbox at any time, and I write my emails accordingly.

In this particular case the universities may be doing it not only the save money, but also for their own protection. If students are forced to use separate email systems for their personal stuff, which may well include illegal activities, that's a win for the university. They'd like nothing more than to be able to say that their email systems are monitored and are strictly for educational purposes. That gives them better cover when the RIAA comes knocking on their door.

Re:Just use separate email account

[coyotecult]

I think the relationship between a student and a University is slightly different than a relationship between a employee and their company. Also, almost everyone already has their own personal emails as well as university ones, but need to use the university ones to receive certain notifications. (Like, class has been cancelled, this assignment has changed, you need to register for classes, your such-and-such check has come in, etc.) Public universities are also required to provide things like Section 508 accessibility (I don't think WLM is 508 accessible).

These kind of decisions are supposed to be made with input from specific committees. So far, our emails haven't indicated these committees being involved in this decision.

I don't think this in any way forces students to use separate email systems for their personal stuff. I think it inconveniences many users using these email systems for their University stuff.

My college started doing this....

[Anonymous Coward]

My college started doing this as a voluntary beta testing for students who wanted a larger e-mail quota. Many have signed up, only a few have stayed. Most can't stand it and request to be moved back to the Exchange server.

Re:Get what you pay for -- free email hosting from

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm down at Rolla, and we've got the same pilot program for students who want a larger quota. And almost everyone who signs up wants to be put back on Exchange. I don't think UM, or at least UMR, plans on going through with a mass migration, in fact, I think they've actually stopped moving any new students over to Live now, since it's just a waste of time when more than 90% of the time, they want to be moved back to Exchange in a week.

I work in IT there as well as well so I have a decent understanding of the UM system. UMR, UMC, UMSL and UMKC are so tightly integrated with Exchange and Active Directory that I think any sort of mass migration for one school would be damned near impossible and it would have to be an all-or-nothing deal. And based on the comments from UMR's guinea pigs, I don't see UMR ever considering this, which probably automatically means the others won't either.

Besides, UMR's invested quite a bit in their Exchange servers and we have very competent server technicians who know what they're doing with said servers, I just can't see them dumping all that and letting M$ handle it.

Perhaps this is a good idea for some tiny liberal arts college whose idea of an IT department is one single person who barely graduated from ITT Tech, but at a school where such a huge focus is placed on technology, I don't think they'll be outsourcing anything.

Re:Get what you pay for -- free email hosting from

[Stephen Samuel]

Linux must get full support for NTFS. Linux now has a pretty decent NTFS support option. The latest knoppix CD (or DVD) gives almost full NTFS read/write (and can also boot from NTFS -- but then it sets the NTFS partition that it boots from read-only, but that is a KNOPPIX bug, not an NTFS support problem).

Someone who know gmail

[Per Abrahamsen]

Gmail gives you three options when mail is downloaded with pop: keep in inbox, archive, or delete. Go to settings -> forwarding and pop to test for yourself.

Same story, different school

[Anonymous Coward]

My University switched over to using Microsoft for our email as well. I've heard a number of reasons, most (if not all) of which are total crap:

1) Using the service saves the university over $100k annually (my school has 2600 students, so highly unlikely)
2) Supposedly our site license on Microsoft products was going to get revoked if we didn't *upgrade* to Microsoft's new way of doing things.
3) So on and so forth

All this mess has caused so far is a headache for the secretaries, since nobody goes out of their way to check for email from the University with the new system. The biggest source of notification from the school is dead in the water, and it seems the students are powerless to help it.

I'm glad this thread came up, it's nice to know we're not going through hell all on our own. (Although I'd never wish this on anyone)

Seems like discrimination to me

[Z00L00K]

If you can claim that you are unjustly discriminated due to political belief it may take hold. Or you may actually go public in one or another form with your complaint. Check with your local newspaper to see what they think.

And why not go public with the name of the institution in question instead? This will put a lot more pressure on them regarding the issue.

What about the general student community then, are they in general just accepting this or can you whip up enough people to make a considerable demonstration against the policy?

SDSU (South Dakota State) on Hotmail

[sheepweevil]

Uggh. We are on Hotmail, which doesn't support POP3 or forwarding either. Its really annoying to have to go and check that email, because the school has the habit of sending one really important email right after I check (which is usually about once a week).

Re:SDSU (South Dakota State) on Hotmail

[coyotecult]

Is there any chance you could coordinate with us to try and get your technical services to start asking Microsoft about POP? Our site is at: iwantmypop.com.

Re:Get what you pay for -- free email hosting from

[yoyhed]

Try ntfs-3g. Full read/write support, and it just came out of beta to production status. More than decent, I've been using it without any problems for a while :-)

Use a POP proxy

[Aidan Steele]

Like FreePOPs. You can have your Windows Live Mail and POP3, too!

Re:Use a POP proxy

[coyotecult]

On a cursory glance, this might be just the solution I've been searching for! (Even though I really hope it's temporary.) Thank you very much!

Microsoft does not support mail forwarding

[Mitch Monmouth]

Hotmail and all "Live" services lock you in by not allowing you to forward email. This prevents you from migrating your Microsoft address. I have encountered this issue numerous times when organizations start up with Hotmail addresses, then need to a better system. They need to continue logging in to Hotmail for years until they are sure that the published Hotmail address is no longer being used.

Every other major free mail service supports mail forwarded. I strongly recommend against ANY organization or person using Microsoft mail services because of this. You will be stuck!

You missed the point

[cheros]

I agree that using the one or the other service to host email wouldn't be a big deal if it wasn't for the lock-in. They are forcing the whole population of students into a proprietary setup that should not exist in this day and age where POP3, IMAP and SMTP are known to most people that have been near a computer.

There's only one reason to prevent remote access, and that is blatant lock in - THAT is what should be avoided at all costs. Unless, of course, the Uni is also prepared to pay the students the costs of migrating to Windows, keeping anti-virus up to date, support etc for all those that do not use Windows and thus don't have virus problems. In other words, the Uni be prepared to cough up for the liabilities it is creating for the students, and that could get VERY ugly.

Civil liberties issue?

[coats]

Two thoughts:

• This is a civil liberties/constitutional rights issue: Given that it is quite reasonable to believe that Microsoft is a wicked corporation (and it certainly has been convicted of monopolistic practices, and accused of much more), it is grossly improper to require you as a student at a governmental university to support Microsoft by buying and running its software. Arguably, this is a Fourteenth-Amendment issue: you are being required to submit to economic slavery to Bill Gates. You should get both the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) involved. The university ought to be required as a matter of law to back down from this decision.

• As others have suggested: Can you run what you need under Crossover or VMWare?

Does Windows Live email support forwarding?

[jfaughnan]

If it supports a redirect or forwarding then the lock-in is less onerous. You shouldn't rely on a school email address anyway, it typically goes away when you graduate, transfer, leave, etc. Gmail is quite excellent; my mother uses it with OS X Mail.app and has no idea that a web interface to her mail exists.

The bigger problem is that Microsoft will then move more and more of their infrastructure into this environment, locking out other alternatives. I suspect the next big lock-in would be their music and video infrastructure. That's what I'd do if I were them. Sooner or later they'll seize the college music scene, and then squeeze Apple to the margins.

I don't see anything to do about it. Microsoft's monopoly and revenues is an almost irresistible force. You can thank George Bush for that ... (the least of his sins).

Re:Get what you pay for -- free email hosting from

[mochan_s]

Yeah, if you don't care about your student, staff and faculty privacy's, then using gmail (or microsoft mail) is fine.

Not only does Google get to store your e-mails, all the slashdot ads (by Google) are mapped with the gmail account, all your searches are mapped with the gmail account etc etc. Essentially, google gets to store which sites you go to, what searches you do and so on.

Massive Privacy Violation.

[Anonymous Coward]

The University is REQUIRED to protect students privacy, identity, and grade information.

I remember filling out a form granting my Parents the ability to see my grades.

How can the University guarantee students privacy when handing control over to Microsoft?

Big Bad Idea.

Lawyers and Lawsuits are soon to follow.

Perfect Solution for Your University

[EmailHosting.com]

I have the perfect solution for you. Recommend the company EmailHosting.com to the university. They will be able to give the university a price that reasonable and their service will eliminate spam/viruses entirely. In addition, they support IMAP, POP3, etc. You can check your email from anywhere. Visit http://www.emailhosting.com/ today and then forward the link to the university. I hope they make this change and I know they will be grateful to you for passing this along to them. Thanks!

Re:Perfect Solution for Your University

[coyotecult]

How much space per email box? How much experience does the company have with exceedingly large clients? Unfortunately, the University seems to have a great yearning for some kind of shared calendar-type ability, so I doubt they'd be interested in something so mundane as email that just functions like it should.

Re:Get what you pay for -- free email hosting from

[EmailHosting.com]

I have the perfect solution for you. Recommend the company EmailHosting.com to the university. They will be able to give the university a price that reasonable and their service will eliminate spam/viruses entirely. In addition, they support IMAP, POP3, etc. You can check your email from anywhere. Visit http://www.emailhosting.com/ today and then forward the link to the university. I hope they make this change and I know they will be grateful to you for passing this along to them. Thanks!

We're doing Google Apps for Education

[budGibson]

I'm a prof at Eastern Michigan University and have been spearheading an effort to get Google apps for education installed. We are currently doing a pilot in the College of Business where I teach. Universities opt for this kind of solution because they just don't have the resources to maintain an email infrastructure. SPAM currently accounts for over 80% of email, meaning that universities have to devote five times the resources to pure email volume than they would if there were no SPAM.

Further, the more users a system has, the more likely it is to be better at SPAM protection and user interface. SPAM protection is a statistical process that improves with larger numbers. Interface improves when it has to be idiot proof for large numbers of users. Gmail and other "hosted" solutions have all of these traits. Standalone university systems do not. Frankly, even large universities would profit by moving over to hosted solutions on these counts. Universities used to be the large players in Internet email. Now, they are the small players.

Regarding the issue of lock-in, given that there are numerous solutions out there, there's no reason to choose one that locks you in to the extent described by the poster

Re:We're doing Google Apps for Education

[coyotecult]

Thanks for the thought on SPAM protection, that's a good point.

ITT does it Different

[pentalive]

When I enrolled, they asked me for MY email address. If I did not have email, they would have helped me setup
email at the provider **of my choice**, What little official email I have gotten has come to the email address
I provided to them.

Re:Boo Hoo

[glidermike]

I would rather masturbate to my lovely shapely Debian Linux than be a Microsoft pervert/jackoff

Start a large public stink

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey Dude,
When Ohio State did a similar nazi trick with the dorm firewall, I talked to the vice-provost of student afairs and she helped me arranged a meeting with the IT staff. In about 3 days and 200 posters, I got about 100 students to show up and air their grievances. I used a few legitimate complaints; I couldn't do anything since the firewall broke XDMCP without going to the classroom. (Hard to do in the winter on crutches) and other students had similarl legitimate complaints. The firewall stayed, but the more draconian policies got fixed.

I'd recommend the same thing. If you get a little more lead time then I did, you can even put something in the student newspaper and the student radio (if you have one) advertise the meeting all over campus. If you cause a big enough stink (and their decision is affecting the whole university, not just dorm residents) then you have a fair change of getting some concessions from the universtiy.

If you've got any questions, please email me at kay ell a pea pea dot two at osu.edu. Throw "resnet" in the subject field.

Re:Get what you pay for -- free email hosting from

[Silas is back]

Not only does Google get to store your e-mails, all the slashdot ads (by Google) are mapped with the gmail account, all your searches are mapped with the gmail account etc etc. Essentially, google gets to store which sites you go to, what searches you do and so on. Great! I hope Google uses my data to one day provide me free links to porn I might really like! What a service!

Re:Get what you pay for -- free email hosting from

[Derek Pomery]

Well, you won't be able to deliver to me at least.
Microsoft drops all e-mail to so-called "dynamic" ranges without even a reject. Doesn't even route the packets.
So, I bounce all e-mail from those servers with a reject requesting they find another mail provider.
Amusingly, from my experiments, Hotmail/Live Mail masks the reject reason.

GMail has no such issues. Google effortlessly keeps the mail flowing without trying to restrict a hierarchy of mail delivery.

Re:Get what you pay for -- free email hosting from

[Derek Pomery]

Sorry. That should say *from* dynamic ranges.
So, I'd be unable to reply to a "Live Mail" account once it delivered to me.
So, I don't allow it to deliver to me.
Tit for tat.
If you can't be bothered to whitelist the MX record and machine you just tried delivering to,
I'm not going to waste my time reading something I can't reply to.

EmailHosting.com Provides IMAP & POP3

[EmailHosting.com]

If you are looking for an affordable solution to your email hosting needs, look no further than EmailHosting.com. They provide support for both IMAP & POP3 as well as a host of other features. Check out the site at http://www.emailhosting.com/

Um, no...

[TheNetAvenger]

Because of that limitation, the only freely available mail client it supports is Windows Live Desktop, which is only available on Windows

If you don't use Windows, then just access your Live Mail account via your browser, and yes it supports FireFox, etc.

What is the freaking difference between this and Hotmail or Gmail?

Even in large companies, email clients are becoming a thing of the past. Most companies are picking mail server software based on the Web Interface today. Client mail tools like Outlook, etc are used internally on corporate networks, but outside the intranet, users use and are encouraged to use the Web interface for email, as the web features of many of them are at the level of functionality of dedicated client software.

MS has no reason to support POP or IMAP for Live Mail, just like Hotmail of the past which orginally had NO POP or IMAP access.

I'm not going to say Windows Live Mail is great, because I have very little experience with it, but I do realize this isn't about forcing Windows on anyone, as all it takes is a browser to access, and MS has been working very hard to ensure firefox and other browsers get the same level of functionality as IE users do with Live Mail and all their Live services being deeply invested in universal client AJAX technologies.

Re:Um, no...

[coyotecult]

I'd like to note that I've been pointing out this isn't forcing Windows on us, per se, but non-Windows systems do have substandard support, because there are NO supported desktop email clients. This problem could be solved with the addition of POP or IMAP access. I don't think the web client for Windows Live Mail is Section 508 complaint, either, and it needs to be. This, too, could be solved with the addition of POP or IMAP access.

What is the freaking difference between this and Hotmail or Gmail?

It's more about the freaking difference between this and our old system, which had POP and IMAP access. Also, GMail has POP access freely available. Actually, there really ISN'T a difference between this and Hotmail, literally, which has caused annoyance and confusion--when students go to the place they're supposed to log in to their WLM account, they'll be greeted with their Hotmail inboxes if they're logged in. In order to access their WLM account, they have to log out of their Hotmail, log back in, and lose the browser's ability to remember their log in so they don't have to type username@vandals.uidaho.edu every single time. The people who prefer web clients don't like that. The people who prefer their desktop mail client are ticked, because it doesn't work with them--not even on MS products like Outlook and Eudora. And what's worse, is they switched without realizing it because the new system is being promoted so heavily without any notice of the consequences. One day their mail client works, with its automatic checking for new mail and filters and ease and convenience. The next day, it's gone, and they can't switch back.

The only mail client we've gotten to work besides Windows Live Mail Desktop is Thunderbird, which has an extension. This is NOT ideal: it's basically a hack that could break at any moment. As far as I understand, our ITS won't even support WLMD. I think it's because of the ads and beta status.

Re:Um, no...

[TheNetAvenger]

POP or IMAP

Something to think about... POP and IMAP are old, very old, and still have many inherent flaws that haven't been resolved.

Many companies have tried to invent new standards to deal with security or work around the limitations, but in today's age of email and internet new standards should be taking over.

There are reasons why MS doesn't use POP or IMAP as the default communication with outlook and exchange for example. Only a subset of the features being offered in new generation email can be done with the old standards.

I agree that by not having POP3 or IMAP it IS a 'limitation', but I also realize why companies are trying to push users to different client methods. Using a rich web interface is one way of solving both with the advances in browser based AJAX or alternative technologies.

POP and IMAP are inherently insecure, have no control for SPAM, etc. Yes I know a lot of email servers have mechanisms to deal with these issues, but think a few years ahead, we need new standard mechanisms.

What is the next generation beyond POP and IMAP? If not rich web clients, then where does email need to progress next? What other new interfaces are out there that meet the needs of today? And how can the migration happen without leaving people behind now, since there are only a few clients that support installable communication methods?

Re:Um, no...

[coyotecult]

Question: what sort of things do you think would need to be implemented in an email protocol that would require a rich web client instead of a desktop client? It may just be the late hour, but I think the interface a user sees their email with can be separated from the protocol used to send it to the mail server in almost all instances. Desktop mail clients are very useful for lots of things, like downloading your email and reading it while you are offline.

If Microsoft's protocol is indeed a useful progression of methods, then maybe they could publish their protocol so that there would be more clients that supported it in an official manner. And I think clients would love to support it! The existence of the Hotmail Webmail extension hack for Thunderbird proves that. But so far, Microsoft doesn't seem interested in creating a new industry standard protocol at all. Rather, it locks the users into one client available on one operating system if they want to download their emails.

Re:Um, no...

[TheNetAvenger]

Question: what sort of things do you think would need to be implemented in an email protocol that would require a rich web client instead of a desktop client? It may just be the late hour, but I think the interface a user sees their email with can be separated from the protocol used to send it to the mail server in almost all instances. Desktop mail clients are very useful for lots of things, like downloading your email and reading it while you are offline.


One problem with SMTP, POP3, IMAP etc is the ease in which SPAM can be generated. Having a web or desktop client that abandons these protocols eliminates the uses of Live Mail for example from generating SPAM or using the servers in destructive ways from the User side.

Incoming is still an issue, but in this example, the Universities don't have to worry about their students/teachers using their accounts to flood SPAM or malicious email easily to other users. It is harder to add Viruses and Spyware without user intent.

So I can see why this would be apealing to something like a Univerisity or School, as they don't have to worry as much about their students using their email access to cause harm.

I don't know if the Exchange protocol is all that great in comparison to other ideas out there, but it does lock the control to the Exchange server instead of the users.

Re:Um, no...

[coyotecult]

I'll note here that my University has asked Microsoft for POP, but Microsoft wasn't providing it at the time. So I don't think they don't want to support POP. They try to reassure us by saying that Microsoft might implement POP because their service is evolving and we should just hope it will happen. So it's not a policy of not supporting POP, it's just that POP wasn't a requirement. Why not, I don't know.

Re:Um, no...

[TheNetAvenger]

So I don't think they don't want to support POP. They try to reassure us by saying that Microsoft might implement POP because their service is evolving and we should just hope it will happen. So it's not a policy of not supporting POP, it's just that POP wasn't a requirement. Why not, I don't know.

To support POP3, they would also have to support SMTP to send out. And my guess is that by doing this, they can't lock down your email as tight as they apparently want. By giving up POP3 and SMTP, they ensure students won't be Spamming or accidentally letting a trojan on a student's computer attempt to send infected email.

Like I said, it is a pain, but it also offers a small degree of control on the user's/student's email to prevent purposeful or accidental malicious usage.

This is why there needs to be new authenication methods, new protocols, or a standard way to control such issues and still give people a choice of using a stand alone client that is not OS specific.

Re:Um, no...

[multi io]

To support POP3, they would also have to support SMTP to send out. And my guess is that by doing this, they can't lock down your email as tight as they apparently want. By giving up POP3 and SMTP, they ensure students won't be Spamming or accidentally letting a trojan on a student's computer attempt to send infected email.

Sorry but this sounds like plain FUD on your part. The exchange protocol certainly has some groupware features that POP/IMAP/SMTP lack, but how is it inherently better than, say, SMTP-Auth over SSL, in preventing users from unintentionally sending spam? If the user can send mail, he can send spam, and if some malicious program is running, it can send mass mails automatically. And of course you can still "lock the control to the server" with SMTP as well -- all mails have to go through it, after all. The server can implement some advanced sender authentication schemes like SPF or challenge-response schemes like hash cash or whatever. So, how can you say that the exchange protocol, which you admit you don't even know, is better here?

With that in mind I'd surely choose a protocol that leaves me free choice to use whatever advanced mail client I want, as opposed to the choice between a single specific MS-only client and a web client, thank you very much.

Re:Get what you pay for -- free email hosting from

[Derek Pomery]

Addendum.
I just rechecked this broken behaviour from the past couple years.
It appears I was able to connect and attempt to deliver a letter.

Based on this, I retract my earlier complaint and have removed my blocks.

*thumbs up on Live Mail*

Re:Get what you pay for -- free email hosting from

[innocent_white_lamb]

Don't you mean my services and my company? Your screen name is your your company name, after all.
 
The wording of your advertisement here is somehwat misleading as you are attempting to sound like a neutral third party or a satisfied customer; it's a futile effort when your screen name gives your actual relationship away.
 
Be up-front and honest about these things when you promote your company and you will get a lot further and appear a lot more trustworthy. After all, if I can't trust you to state your relationship to your company in an honest fashion, why should I trust you with hosting my email?

Too busy?

[notthe9]

I don't have the time to regularly check for web-mail, during the day

Find it.

Spam filtering is easy

[Anonymous Coward]

Plenty of companies to choose from. I myself run a service which runs exclusively over systems hosted in countries where US and EU do not have the ability to legally subvert the service to establish a data tap, but which still have decent privacy laws. Plenty of private banks like it. As you're US I would suggest you what MessageLabs is charging (but, of course, with the above potential risk to privacy).

As for volume, I'm aware of one company in the system that has to throw away approx 4 mil spam messages PER HOUR (yes, not per day, per hour). Not a problem either.

Re:Get what you pay for -- free email hosting from

[DeadChobi]

I for one welcome our new email mapping overlords!

Comments from the IT Department

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for this University's Help Desk. First of all, let me say that I completely oppose this decision. But unfortuantly, my work requires me to keep a happy face on. Anyway, I just wanted to let everyone know about the current situation.

Currently, we're using iPlanet from Sun to handle our e-mail. It costs about $50,000 a year to run, and is difficult to maintain. As such, we were in need of a replacement. Most students would agree with this.

Now this is where it gets muddy. I don't know who was in charge of deciding to go to Live Mail. We had a recent addition of a Messaging team. I don't know if they decided to go with it, or if they were only in charge of implementing it.

All we know is, the student government body played a large part in it. My co-worker and I are going to print a nice editorial in our paper about their complete lack of discussion with the student body.

Here are some facts that are making students angry.

1. Although we have a migration wizard, it's still not as easy as it could be. If the student does not have any custom folders in their mailbox, then we automatically send all their current e-mail via SMTP to their new mailbox. This resets all the "received" dates, but users still have the content. If they have custom folders, then they must migrate their mail manually (although the Help Desk will step them through it). This requires firing up Windows Live Mail Desktop (we have it on our lab machines), and copying the mail over.

2. No IMAP or SMTP support. Users can either use Windows Live Mail Desktop (although the Help Desk won't support it since it is in beta), use the web interface, or use the Thunderbird extension (we *really *don't support that).

3. Change of e-mail address. Students have to go from @domain.edu to @ourmascot.domain.edu. This is because staff are moving to Exchange, and it proved too difficult to split the domain in half. We will have forwarding set up until January 2008, but it really is a breach of student policy (policy says that the student e-mail address will never change over the course of their time at the University). I plan on making sure it fowards until we graduate.

It proved too expensive to move everyone to Exchange. Another issue is that student policy requires a student's primary address to be a University given one. So moving to a personal one is not an option. I plan on getting that changed as well.

Anyway, we've started a website www.iwantmypop.com to protest. Please, if you find out which University this is, complain to the student government. We at the Help Desk have absolutely no control over it. Plus, our Help Desk ticket tracker is already full of complaints ;)

Re:Comments from the IT Department

[coyotecult]

I want to thank you help desk guys so much for toughing this thing out. You're all aces.

Move

[FrozenFOXX]

Honestly, go to a different University. Seriously, if an institute of LEARNING is telling you that having an open mind (aka using different OSes and programs still compatible with recognized standards) is not allowed then I wouldn't deem them fit to educate anyone. And besides, if everyone has to be able to access their mail that'd include the people in a UNIX lab (I've not seen a university with a CS program that doesn't have a UNIX/Linux lab). So they'd just be excluding any of those from checking their e-mail? Good idea, right. Why would you want to outsource the e-mail anyway? Is it really THAT big a deal to host e-mail? Really? What about the concerns of privacy? Because it's going through a third party what if they decided to spy on your messages? That's some scary shit right there and what's to stop them?

Two choices

[Coeurderoy]

If your university is a private university, this is a good moment to change it.
If it is a public university you should start to lobby your local government against this abuse.

Obviously it might not be easy, maybe this university is the only one where you can learn what you want that is convenient or even possible for you.

But concider that if you are learning anything related to IT you are learning it at a University that is completelly out of bound on this subject.
Even if the service would be perfect, not managing your own infrastructure if you are supposed to teach this to your student is just plain ridiculous.

If you are learing anything related with politics, communication, philosophy the same reasoning applies albeit for different reason, but obviously if you outsource your community to "big brother" you are not an intellectual, and you should not try to teach anything intellectually challenging to your students.

Even if your are majoring in Business this would be a very bad example.
The "Community" is the core of any business, and not being able to manage your own "users" is incredibly stupid.

On the other hand you will most probably not be spammed by requests for funds by your university when you graduate, on the other hand you will get even more "viagra/hoodia/loan extension/etc..." offer than before.

it's ok

[placzkiewicz]

windows live mail uses the http protocol for mail, hence you can use it from any browser. i'm checking mail using it on firefox right now (which runs on Mac, Linux and Windows). it's just like having a free hotmail/gmail/yahoo account.

It'll be ok. Good luck!

Amy P

Re:it's ok

[coyotecult]

I have a free throwaway hotmail account for giving things I register I don't want to give my real email address. It's not okay--I know it works in browsers on all three systems, but it does not work with my desktop mail client that I've used with the University for three years.

In fact, you're most certainly right in that it's JUST like a Hotmail account. Literally. Which creates another problem. In that all students who do have Windows Live Hotmail accounts they're already logged into have to log out of their Hotmail accounts and log into their Windows Live Mail accounts for the University and can't use the default remember me functions on the website. Students are reporting that it's quite a pain, and it also causes some measure of confusion when they're told to log in at this site to their mail and they end up in their Hotmail mailboxes!

Hello Gmail people

[hey]

You'd better offer an gmail @ edu thing too.
Why not.

Re:Get what you pay for -- free email hosting from

[Achromatic1978]

So, how much email do you think you've actually missed because of your block due to your inattention to their delivery policy?

Not a finger at you, directly, but generically this is a big problem, maintenance of these lists, even on RBLs which are dedicated to the purpose.

Re:Get what you pay for -- free email hosting from

[coyotecult]

Is there any change you could coordinate with us to encourage IATS to poke Microsoft about POP access? Our efforts have our University talking to MS about it, so I'm hoping more than one University doing it might help. You can get our contact info and all the information we've collected on our particular roll out (including all the complaints and problems we have been hearing about from our students) at our website: iwantmypop.com.

lies

[Anonymous Coward]

1) Using the service saves the university over $100k annually (my school has 2600 students, so highly unlikely) lol. You could host email for that number of students with one low-end 1U server. I could put the total cost per year on my Visa.

2) Supposedly our site license on Microsoft products was going to get revoked if we didn't *upgrade* to Microsoft's new way of doing things. Definitely a lie.

Bad idea

[gurps_npc]

Universities of ANY kind live on donations from alumni.

Email is a great way to keep in touch and retain contact with your alumni. You want them to:

1. Keep the email that says @my_university.com Forever. Preferablly as their 'prime' personal email. Particullary for job interviews, etc. where you don't want to use your current business'es email.

2. Think of their email as a live connection to the school

3. Get as little advertisement as possible, ... except from the school themselves

4. Respect the school as a bastion of intelligence and competence

Letting MS host them is stupid. They should run it themselves, with special features, for free. It is a BENEFIT to the school, not a cost.

Google Apps

[Anonymous Coward]

Google offers Google Apps for free. Google Apps are all gmail, and calendar services for any domain name. So you can propose to your university to change to google apps. It offers POP3 and a open web API with you can use the gmail as IMAP with some application http://digg.com/software/An_IMAPv4_gateway_to_Gmai l

See http://www.google.com/a/

This just in..MS LIVE WILL offer POP for FREE.

[Happy_Potatoes]

You heard it hear first...all the angry young spuds will be Dancing on The Floor Like A Wild Potato! MS has just offered the UI free POP services for Windows Live. The service will be offered to UI students first, then rolled out to others around the country. I only have one question: Who is this new helpful guy calling himself "Microsoft Engineer", and what have they done with the real 'softie'?

Re:Get what you pay for -- free email hosting from

[Stephen Samuel]

I believe that that's what Knoppix uses. I've dumped an entire DVD to an NTFS partition, so I also think it works reasonably well, but it is (for whatever reason) somewhat slow -- but that may be an NTFS problem, as opposed to an ntfs-3g problem.

Re:Get what you pay for -- free email hosting from

[yoyhed]

Probably an NTFS 'problem', if you're used to ext3/reiser performance...

FreePOPs

[Walter Carver]

Maybe http://www.freepops.org/ can do the job. It works for Yahoo and Hotmail, maybe it will work for Windows Live Mail too.

Re:Get what you pay for -- free email hosting from

[Derek Pomery]

Who knows. Not that much from folks I cared about, who I had already given the why and wherefore on this.

I'm not at all a fan of RBLs, ones that block entire ranges. In this case I was blocking one ISP that was the source of a tiny fraction of my e-mail,
and of course engaging in bad behaviour.

Who knows, maybe blocks like mine were why they stopped blocking?