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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?"
A quick google brought this up on the first page of results.
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.
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.
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.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
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.
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.
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/
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.
Seems like my POP access can delete the e-mail just fine.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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. :-P and probably is because their automagic organization of the mail threads )
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
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!
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.
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.
The government can't save you.
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.
:P
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.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
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).