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Colleges Outsourcing Email To MS Live, Google
Andy Guess tips us to his article at Inside Higher Ed offering a detailed look at the snowballing trend of colleges outsourcing their email infrastructure, mostly to Google and Microsoft Live. Even outsourcing just email would presage big changes in the work that IT departments do on campus; but more such changes are on the horizon as schools grapple with entering freshmens' already entrenched online habits.
Lets face it. Higher Ed. Has below average skills in handling their own IT Infrastructure. Their budget is usually enough for one good manager and a bunch of college students who need spending cash. Keeping an email system up an running with blocking Spam is a lot of work normally way above what normal College IT have the skills or resources to do. So Google and Microsoft Live want more email users. So I say let them have it. Just modify the domain name to allow college.edu emails to go to the gmail account and things are all hunky dory. I work for a small business and I have been slowly outsourcing our email to GMAIL its free and it is easier and less work and expense on our end.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
If I was a university president, my motto would be "Get a gmail account, bitches", then I'd be all like, "Regeants: Up my pay another $150K", then under my breath I'd be like, "bitches."
This might not be good for campuses that may experience network outages. With servers on campus, at least messages could be sent via the network rather then the internet, but now, if the internet is down, Live or Google goes down (possible for Live far-fetched though for Google) or MS (or possibly Google) decides to charge for a "premium" account that takes away features from the "free" counterpart. And also, if MS's or Google's web-mail system gets exposed to security venerabilities, it could be just as insecure as Outlook or IE.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
Most of the academics I work with (professors, grad students, undergrads) already use either a regular gmail or yahoo account for their primary email address. Usually these services have better spam protection, higher storage limits, and better portability than a university email address.
This isn't new. Early in my tech support years, one of my first jobs was for a small division of MCI (1992?) Called Campus MCI. Not only had quite a few colleges outsourced e-mail (they were on MCI servers using the same systems as the consumer internet) but also the internet connectivity.
I've worked IT at a College for 5 years now. We actually had a push for MS live taking over our e-mail from some of our co-workers. It has always scared me, and much prefer keeping it in house. M$ was going to do everything for us for FREE. They would keep us up with the times, keep data secure, etc...
My two main issues:
1. If (when) M$ starts charging for this down the road, then what? They could charge virtually anything they wanted for us to get our e-mails back if we didn't like their new price.
2. We do sometimes lose connection to the internet, internal e-mail will no longer work
Take a look at the weavers during the 18th century. As soon as power and roads allowed. That's approximately what's going to happen to internal IT organisations and independent software places.
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No matter what the future brings, the big sharks of information management will always find something others find worthy of outsourcing. Entire companies have been moving their corporate email to Google. One company I worked at last year did that. Can't say much of the experience, since I left shortly after. Nevertheless, I believe a lot of the universities that focus their courses on technology will choose to keep managing their own email systems as they also use it as learning/teaching/training tools and real world use cases.
Onda Technology Institute
it's a good deal when you consider the alternatives are dark & dismal death/debt & disruption at the hands of the corepirate nazi execrable whois holding many of us hostage. see you there?
Really? Long time ago, my university used to have a strict policy about electronic transmission of things like student grades or research data...
So I wonder why these days any American Uni would want their intellecual property transmitted over google.cn routers?
The whole country going down the tubes, looks like.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
I have my university emails all forwarded to GMail already, but I have used our web-mail systems and have found that they are not half bad. It's just that GMail is even cleaner and aggregates all my messages and calendars for me. Some of my friends (after seeing what I did) followed suite, while others still preferred to keep school and everything else separate.
You mean, its like Linuzzzz and Abble? Oh, I get it!
Gee, was it only ten years ago when UNL switched everyone, faculty and students, from normal e-mail to Lotus Notes? No, I think it had to be longer than that.
At it seems they still are using it, at least 10 years later. (Even some of the old pages still exist.) Most recent news: attachment size limit has been scaled back to 120 MB "to increase productivity and reliablity". If I hadn't linked it, you could have found it by searching for that misspelling (and two other hits for the phrase, sadly).
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Speaking as one of those alleged incompetent educational IT directors, I'm not seeing a lot of value in this. Email costs us next to nothing now. Let's see, I have 40,000 active accounts now on one server, using Cyrus, dspam, clam-av, and policyd. All the software is free so the cost is basically a new server every three years and some storage space on the SAN (email is a very small portion of space on the SAN so freeing it up won't buy us much).
Yeah, if I had an Exchange farm and a dedicated staff to manage it, then outsourcing it would be enticing. As it is now, it'd be more work to figure out how to migrate people away from a tried-and-true solution as well as the privacy and FERPA issues than it is to let it ride as is, and if people do something stupid like delete a folder, we can easily restore it from backup in short order.
In-house also means being able to use a single-sign on solution for all campus services. Same ID, sign in once using CAS (Central Auth Service -- another freebie package)
(We do provide an interface for users to forward their emails to their preferred provider. No one is forcing them to use us.)
Now what I would like to do is outsource shared calendaring service with seamless syncing to a plethora of mobile devices. That's a need that hasn't been adequately addressed in-house. ie, before fixing stuff that's not broken, how about helping with services that fix what *is* broken!
btw, news flash, people under 20 don't use email much anyway. It's basically the tool of "old people." Email is busted in many ways and will probably die as a platform in the future anyway. I say let it ride as is until then.
Now get off my lawn.
Especially for google. Why? Not because i think the concerncs about privacy etc. could not be settled legally in a binding way or because of the loss e-mail when the college looses connectivity. Just for a very simple reason: in recent times, if something can be done via google, responsibles turn their head to autopilot and stop thinking. And while for most of the users outsourced mail is ok, i would think that some, e.g. the Network administrators, an the board of the Institution need internal e-mail, as well as Hospitals connected to the Unioversity (In Germany these exist). No try to explain such things to somebody whose head was just turned off. The qustion: "Why cant we use gmail?" could be difficult to explain in this case.
Yeah, let's pay to SELL OUT our students! What a brilliant idea. If some BANK came to your school, and said hey we'll help out a bit with your accounting department functions if you will just make sure all your students use our BANK, you'd look at them like they were insane. However when it comes to selling out students to be captive CONSUMERS of a big evil email vendor, people see few problems. Can't you see the business of MS and Google is NOT EMAIL? Are people blind & stupid? They are in the business of capturing your online existence, as a TOOL to sell you stuff you don't need. To imprison and describe you in every conceivable way and use you. To own your eyeballs and mind. I see it as entirely disingenuous to describe it as "free", the linkages required with Google go deep and they require ongoing work to maintain an authentication & authorization infrastructure that is compatible. The COSTS are NOT zero as often described.
Just hope that some student or faculty at one of these institutions doesn't get the infamous lockdown in sector 4.
Would you trust a faceless corporation to important course or departmental messages in such an instance?
Those with a clue run their own mail servers.
I am currently in my senior year at a small college. When I started, we had a web-based email system that barely worked, set up by an IT staff that had all been fired, and the new IT staff didn't have time to use it. So everyone forwarded college email to another account and ignored the campus email system. By the time the IT staff was able to get a new system running, nobody cared. For a while the school disable forwarding to get students to use the system, but that just resulted in students and faculty ignoring their email entirely. Now the school just collects email addresses every semester with registration paperwork, and includes email addresses in class rosters. Our email system is in place, but is only used by a few members of the faculty.
My university is in the process of switching to GMail. The old home-grown system was abysmal at best, but I was simply forwarding all e-mails to my private address and never worried about it. With that system about to be shut down next week, I set up the GMail account I am forced to get today - and I find it really troubling that I had to do so. All I want is to forward my e-mail to my private address again. I have absolutely no interest in Google's services, in their Spam filtering or nifty webmail interface. GMail does offer forwarding. I enabled it and expect never to never in my life visit GMail's site again. But before getting this far, I had to accept Google's terms of service and privacy policy.
I am forced to use the college e-mail address for some administrative stuff. How is it reasonable that this also forces me to accept some third party's terms and rules? If I *wanted* GMail's services, then it is fair game that I would have to accept their terms. But if all I want to do is forward my e-mails and get them off the service as fast as possible, there should be a shortcut way that routes the e-mails around Google's servers, prohibiting Google from having a peek inside. College has picked a third party here and is forcing me to enter into a contract with them. This isn't right.
I go to a school in the U.S. and let's just say the email is notorious for being really, really crappy. It takes about a day to send or receive an email, almost all the spam that I get (which gmail filters as spam) is forwarded from my school email address, and we only get 25 MB. I filled up 25 MB within a month because of all the attachments teachers send to us and expect us to somehow be able to receive. I know a lot of people, myself included, who forward all of their school emails to gmail, since the forwarding isn't nearly as slow as receiving it in the inbox (in the worst days I'd get emails 3-4 days before the rest of the class, no exaggeration), the spam goes where it belongs, and I can save stuff. I therefore am not surprised in the least at this article, and I hope that my school pays attention.
What about a record of every email they sent in college. Every threat to a competing lover, every breakup, every plan to falsify grades.
The nice thing about email on a schools server is that the mail is presumably gone when the student leaves college. OTOH, google promises to keep a copy of everything ever created on it's server.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
There is a lot to be said about educated consumers...
There was a time when you first went to college you got your first email account... and it was all bright and shinny...
Today's kids may or may not have excellent email but they certainly have it and they certainly know what to expect from an account in terms of storage (a few gigs or more), spend, etc.
Plus in the perfect world Google would pay the colleges to mandate their use, but $$ aside, my guess is if a kid has been using AOL mail, etc., they are not so likely to change to the college system.. but whomever switches to the college system (assuming it's one of the public providers) they are likely to keep that account for long time... (IMHO).
http://www.hawknest.com/
My school just migrated over to Google Apps, or rather is in the process of migrating. I understand that network outages, though rare, can result in email downtime, or worse, emails lost forever. This is especially bad at my school, where by policy, official communication from the university to students and vice versa is done via email and email only (this may not be at all unique; I really don't know). However, I can see one great side effect of this, and it is that, if all goes according to plan, I will be able to keep my university email address plus storage (on Google servers, true) indefinitely after I graduate. This would be a big help, as I use my university email as my main address, and it would be a big pain to have to change to another address in a year or so.
Those who anthropomorphize science and/or nature already believe in an intelligent designer.
In Europe institutions of higher learning go out of their way to keep corporate fingers away from their students. They don't give information on their students to recruiters, even though recruiters certainly want to know who's "top of class" and how to get to them. They also provide legal advice and assistance to their students. If a student gets pulled into a serious lawsuit and especially an unfair lawsuit, the law department is likely to step in and defend the student. Handing the emails of thousands of students to companies like Google and MS? That would cause a student protest and lecture walkout large enough to shut down the university and meet with protests from the lecturers and teaching staff as well. So what the hell is wrong with these colleges? Too cheap to maintain a few e-mail servers? Under political pressure to make student e-mails "accessible" to shadowy third parties? How can you hand thousands of student email accounts to for-profit entities outside the university and still protect your students' basic privacy rights?
Google or MSN could (and have) "accidentally" zapped email or entire accounts. That is a considerable danger to a research student using that service as their primary email address and "workspace".
Will Google or MSN care (or even have the facilities) to:
No, no, no, and....no. Yet, all of those things are available to the students whose email server I administer. And you certainly can't run into MSN's office nearby and cry "Help!"; hell, you can't even reach them on the phone. Google's employees are too smart to do that whole "telephone" thing- that's SO 1900's.
Please help metamoderate.
Students should run their own e-mail systems, period. Otherwise, how can IT students prepare for their real life work in future in a realistic environment? Sure the security will not be as tight as an offsite system. But, it is educational by itself to learn how to telnet to port 25 and send a hoax e-mail from Jesus Christ or from your professor. So is catching the hoaxer by looking at the message paths or catching a student admin reading others e-mails and putting him/her to public shame. Most of all, it's a critical part of education to realize that just because you can look at other people's files does not mean you should.
If we remove the educational value of students interacting with each other and learning both skills and morals they will need to function in the outside world for the rest of their lives, we might as well outsource the whole university instead of just the e-mail system. Why not just have some good professors from India read the lecture and answer questions through online chat? Will certainly save students some money...
First, several computers monitors were burned out. ThenI couldn't log in to several computers, cause the network was temporarily down, and each computer authenticated with the server. Secondly, half the printers were down to various reasons. It was extremely aggravating...our IT department is completely inept, shockingly, we just moved to a Microsoft Exchange. And the university is one of the top 50 in the US.
My point is to reaffirm that campus IT departments, with the exception of tech schools, are woefully inept. No one in the library staff had any idea where or how to contact IT about the problems. I've never understood why I pay 20k a year for internet not even as good as a cable modem.
Outlook insecure? Are you living in the 90s?
Wow, angry much? Ever heard of a laugh?
You are so right. Really, the only way to measure a person's worth is to do a Google search on what you think is their name.
I don't see the words "typical" or "average" in what I quoted. You've fabricated "meaning in average in aggregate..." on your own.
I was also an MIT employee for a year, and MIT paid me back ALL that I paid to them in four years.
True story: my boss and I were messing with the web cams on our spiffy SGI workstations very late one night. After maybe two or three minutes, there was a LOUD knock on the door. It was a guy from MIT Networking, from the other end of campus, complaining that the subnet mask on one of the machines was not set right.
"Anonymous Coward" pretty well sums it up.
Please ignore. This is my version of holding a newspaper in a photo for date verification.
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I'm a satisfied user of Google Apps for Education. We did this transition back in August of this year for our users. We do not currently do student email through the service as there is not a good way short of the address formating to specify a student account vs a faculty or staff user. But we are going to have student email accounts next semester.
To clear up a few misconceptions:
1. Ads are turned off for our domain. Nobody will see a google ad in their email client.
2. There is POP and IMAP support just like the normal gmail accounts.
3. It is the most stable beta I've ever seen.
The reason I pushed this is that it is relatively easy and their spam and virus filtering are way better than anything we tried here. I am the only one of the four IT staff that has a serious clue as to running a successful email system and I plan on leaving soon to pursue other opportunities as they say. Gapps is easy for my boss and the other support staff to manage.
We are on connection that has not gone down for an unplanned outage since it was installed in May. Our previous connections were almost as stable with less than 10 minutes of downtime in a year.
It is speedy, it is ubiquitous, and it is cost effective. If students have privacy concerns they can learn how to forward stuff to a POP account someplace else and delete the mail from the gmail box.
The university I attend(I'm a Canadian student at a Canadian university) only internalizes a few things. The CS department handles most of its own things, including an web-based assignment submission system written in Java, but most classes that do anything online either do it through wordpress or the webct system (contains class by class forums, email, and notices). This could be much better simplified into one internalized system, and I'm sure they have the server power/ person power for it. I think internalizing such web-based services is definitely something that would get the attention of tech-y moms and dads sending their tech-y or non tech-y children to school. Worries about self-maintained security are counter-intuitive, professors should want students to try to hack their systems, as long as they set up the appropriate dummy-holes.
What's the value of information that you don't know?
Apparently we looked at it for the University I work at here in Canada but the administration rejected it out of hand. Everyone loved the technical aspects of GMail - the problem was that it was run by a US company. This means that the US government has the ability to force emails to be handed over which, in almost all circumstances, would be a violation of Canadian privacy laws thus leaving the university in very hot water.
Given some of the recent claims from Mr. Bush and co. even having the servers located in Canada would not be sufficient protection as long as it was a US company owning them. So, despite Google's excellent technical product and general trustworthiness, I don't see many countries where there are any sort of privacy laws being able to sensibly use it. In fact the university are very uncomfortable with faculty using personal GMail accounts for exactly the same reason.
Zippy, is that you?
YOW!! What should the entire human race DO?? Consume a fifth of CHIVAS REGAL, ski NUDE down MT. EVEREST, and have a wild SEX WEEKEND!
"as schools grapple with entering freshmens' already entrenched online habits." Since when has this been a problem, let alone a priority for schools? Did schools somehow become democracies that care what the students previous habits were in things like email? How does it teach them anything, if they don't expose them to different environments and conditions that don't conform to what they do in their bedrooms at home? What will happen to them in the corporate world, or military world, or just about any workplace that has a modicum of technology "to deal with?"
I wish there were more sys admins like you.
Our campus IT is fragmented. Although there is a stigma to outsourcing our email, it boils down to the cost of doing business. We need campus wide email and calendar. To this day we still dont have it. Its embarrassing. Obviously it would add great benefit to communication and collaboration. Attempts have been made to do it inhouse but the service doesnt match what google apps can support.
So yea I am disappointed I cant do it inhouse. We simply dont have the funding and resources. And to all the naysayers going on about important emails lost or student info in corporate hands its all moot when you cant communicate with one another in the freaky first place. Think of how research could benefit if we could simply talk and coordinate with each other.
people on ludes should not drive
Comment removed based on user account deletion
All your base are belong to us
In Soviet Russia your college email emails YOU! =)
Wouldn't this perfectly suit a gmail appliance? Personally, I think Gmail's interface for webmail is the best out there. I ended up biting the bullet and moving my personal domain to their free hosted services because I can't offer 5GB of email space to my friends with standard hosting, nor offer the reliability of gmail. But I still have in the back of my mind that ultimately everything is on Google's servers. They're probably better able to handle maintenance than me, but still.
They already have a search appliance. Why not a standalone email appliance that schools and businesses could install, hook it up to gobs of storage space, and there ya go? Hell, make a whole standalone Google Apps appliance, and tear Exchange a new one. You get to keep the email in-house, plus with great search, but with the Google stamp of goodness. I'd give an arm and a leg for this!
The software used in our internal email system is well-known and widely used elsewhere. We even have a pretty webmail that works quite well. It doesn't matter. The pressure to outsource email to Gmail and/or MS Live is overwhelming. The bean counters want it, the kids want it, and the admins want it (because then the outsource provider has to respond to the subpeonas).
Starting next year, our internal email system will only be available to a privileged few: the IT staff, of course; some (especially in medicine where HIPAA requirements apply) faculty, staff, and grad students; and an admin or two who hasn't drunk the Exchange kool-aid. Everybody else is kicked off. The alumni are going first.
GOML - I love it. A new phrase it born, soon to be on the ascendency.
It always interesting to watch internet memes be born, grow in usage, jump the shark and then either dim into ironic retro-use or fade away in oblivion. And then to realize that the entire phenomenon is only being perceived by you from your perspective.
'FTW', for instance. That is relatively new to me - 'For the Win'. It's turned into this year's 'LOL' (circa 2004-5). Of course, that leads you to the whole LOL-Cats thing, which seems to have peaked in the last few months (again, that's how I've perceived it). I recently read, probably linked from somewhere on Slashdot, a comprehensive history of the LOL-Cats meme, with references and historical examples - it must be close to apogee.
Relevant to this post: and on the ascendency in the category of 'forum-shorthand-ackronym' category is "Get Off My Lawn", which I first recall getting some airplay on SNL by Will Forte a year or two ago. And recently being used more and more on Slashdot, usually as shorthand for "the old way was better" or "you have it so easy these days", both of which evoke an aesthetic sense about the virtue of correctness in the face of expediancy.
I like it, and it needs shorthand, just like LOL, YMMV, IANAL, and A/S/L:
As in a retort to a comment about servicing current automobiles, "GOML - it was better when a local mechanic could just adjust the carburetor and clean the points"
'GOML'. (FTW)
The idea of providing these services "for free" is laughable. Google's business is advertising. What is more valuable to Google than knowing every online activity for a demographic like "recent college graduates"? If Google would like to have access to that data, the Universities should be selling it to Google for what it's worth -- presumably much more than it costs to provide email. Of course, maybe members of the University communities wouldn't like to have their personal information auctioned off to the highest bidder.
:w
We use Hotmail as our e-mail provider.
.edu domain, we only have to log in once every 365 days to keep our account from being deleted, and we can forward our mail out to our real accounts.
.edu e-mail address (e.g. Facebook, back when that was still a useful service) was out of reach.
...well, it's still Hotmail. I don't know if you've used it recently, but it's not that great. Sure, having to type my password in every time (no matter how many times I click that "remember my password" checkbox) is annoying, having to click three separate links to fully log-out so I can check my old Hotmail account is annoying, and if we forget that our mail goes through Hotmail and just read it in the destination account for more than a year? Baleeted.
It's pretty much like regular Hotmail (5gigs of space), but we use the school's
The advantage is that, well, now we have an e-mail provider. A few years ago, my school didn't offer e-mail for students at all, so anything that required an
The disadvantage is
But that all pales next to the truly horrid spam filter. Far more often than not, it has flagged legitimate e-mails as spam and spam e-mails as legitimate. The only way to even KNOW that you're missing an e-mail that is stuck in spambox hell is to log in to your account. Nothing is forwarded out, and THERE'S NO WAY TO DISABLE IT COMPLETELY. So half my real e-mails get caught in the spam filter, rendering the entire account totally useless.
It may be free, but I'm not sure it's worth the price.
Don't put advice in your sig.
I never realized Microsoft Research was that large.
I work for a very, very, very large University (while also going to school), and one of my bosses floated the idea of outsourcing email to Microsoft. It was apparently brought up by MS, and some very higher-ups were thinking about it. I pointed out a number of the flaws, including vendor lock-in (which is paramount to me) and made it clear that if they decided to do so, I would not only quit but immediately start sending letters to the newspaper about how they were selling out students to make/save a little money. I'm sure that didn't affect anything, but I haven't heard another word about it in ten months.
Why not require a valid e-mail address before the first day of school or during the admission process? I did not benefit from my university's privacy policies and I just got as much spam as the next guy. To collect e-mail addresses all one had to do was to login to a server and type 'cd $HOME; cd ..; ls'; then add @.'. The downside of using non-school e-mail is that if something happens to Gmail, then students with Gmail accounts may be left out from grades, memos, etc. If a school's system goes down, you know that everybody lacks new information and there is no confusion :)
Universities should focus on what they do best: teach. Stop excessive focus on sports or social clubs. In today's world things like e-mail are almost granted and there is no reason for wasting student's money on what they can get for free otherwise. If you want to have an e-mail server at school, then by all the means do it and provide optional services that is ran by students. At least that way somebody will benefit from hands-on experience. No offense to college IT workers, but sometimes I wondered what was their purpose. Fix printers?
My college considered it but google's EULA was too scary for them. I watched them discuss it on the internal IT list. All these scenarios about how google would go through everyone's email looking for big money ideas, then use their EULA to say they owned it. (Students are protected by privacy laws, but staff are not). Which makes sense for google to spend time doing and risk its multi-100 billions market cap over. The "powers that be" got so worked up over it they are attempting to ban staff and students from using gmail and others.
It wouldn't be so bad if there was an alternative, but the college's home-grown system consists of 100mb total for all email and files, is down several hours every month, is so overloaded with spam it takes 7-8 hours to receive an email from users on the same system, uses aggressive gray-listing so outside emails take a minimum of 14 hours, and they recently announced they no longer backup the system... This has lead to the resurgence of sneaker-net. Students and grad students can be seen running between buildings with thumbdrives because they need to get a 2k word document to someone within a day. The campus backbone is 1GB/s, soon to be 10GB/s, and its completely worthless to 99.9% of the users because they can't do the most basic things.
The root of the problem, though, is that the people in charge of making the decision of switching to gmail are the same people who implemented the current system. They would loose a few jobs and a massive hardware budget, so its just self preservation. Unfortunately my college is government funded, so there's no accountability. Whoever's the head of a department is completely and utterly in charge. Theoretically they are beholden to the board of trustees and university president, but nobody on that is less then like 70, and they don't give a damn about IT beyond making sure the basic marketing buzzwords are in place as to prevent the youngsters from enrolling elsewhere.
Oh boy, here we go again with another article that's just a collecting point for comments about how end users IT departments suck and if they were running things things would be a lot better. Well I saw STF up and put your money were your mouth is. Every user knows more than the IT department at least to hear them tell it. Oh and by the way maybe higher ed. IT staff could keep the network up if they didn't have to contend with P2P traffic choking all the bandwith while simultaneously having to fight off the RIAA instead of doing their real jobs.
why? what's wrong with dreamhost??
"It is good if Google does it, but very bad if MS does, for reasons that do not have any basis in logic."
There, now everyone doesn't have to write all their replies out.
So are the schools going to get any cuts from all of the user information and emails that are going to be scanned for better targeting advertisements?
The college I attend in Northern California is currently taking bids for an outsourced e-mail system. Among them are MS Live, Google, Zimbra and Mirapoint. At least in the past, when there was internet outages on campus, you could still send e-mail within the campus from local machines. I'm not sure I think the outsourcing is a good idea to begin with, but the thought of having MS Live makes me a little stand-off-ish. My campus has free wifi and currently the e-mail system supports windows, mac and linux. So I'm not sure about the Zimbra and Mirapoint, but between the big two competitors, I want google, if we have to change the e-mail. At least they generally support linux well.
.02
Just my
-Eric-
~Liberalism Is A Mental Disorder~
A year ago I lost 7 or 8 years worth of email in my Hotmail account because I got married- and was too busy to check my email for 30 days. Microsoft was kind enough to allow me to reactivate my account if I wished - but the email was gone. Note, some of that email predated Microsoft owning Hotmail.
Needless to say, now I use my university's pop email server and download the emails locally - and back them up. I will never trust my personal archives to a company like that again.
"Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to diminishing returns" -Journal of Political Econom
New York University has switched to SSL email for a reason; private communications between students/registrar, student/faculty, department heads, student/bursar, etc.
Why would a college have such insecure email for important information? Do they just not email anything that private?
Beowulf clusters of printers.
School emails are kind of stupid. Once you graduate, the email is no good anymore. Better to get an email address on your own and keep it forever.
"Use IMAP with a low quota and make the students store their own mail on their own computers."
Why give email addresses to students at all now?
Back when I was in college in the 90's, it made sense for colleges to give students an email address, because in the early to mid 90's, Internet usage still wasn't widespread. Email was a strange and foreign novelty to most then. My first email address was supplied by my school, and I had to physically go to the computer lab to access my mail on a green or orange colored dumb terminal with text-only displays (hey, that was actually fun, though).
Now, the Internet is everywhere, and just about everyone has several email addresses, most of them from free services like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, or Hotmail. Why give a kid yet another email address to keep track of, one that will be taken away from them after graduation?
Why not just require a student to supply an email address when they first arrive, and use that? Then it stays in the admin records, and whenever a new class roster is created each semester, each instructor/grad assistant/professor will be supplied with their students' email addresses along with names, phone numbers, etc.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Our school makes the younger class levels use Web.de. Why? Well, they blocked Google...
However, they didnt block MS services. Nerds.
and presumably MS Windows Live offers pop access as well these days.
It's going to be good for me.
I'm selling toaster-sized boxes pre-loaded with some standard, Open Source software and some Perl scripts of my own making for use as mail servers. You plug in a keyboard and screen to run a simple commissioning script as root, just once; and from then on, everything is configurable through a web browser. If your broadband service has a static IP address (and it should, if you're running a business), you can simply forward port 25 on your router and point an MX record at it; otherwise, I'm reselling an e-mail service which adds the all-important "Envelope-to" header and you can retrieve mail from there by POP3. You can send an e-mail across the office, without it ever leaving the office -- that's got to be good from the privacy angle. And the HDD on these boxes is deliberately small: not only to keep costs down, but also to ensure that old messages get overwritten promptly.
Once a few people get burned by outsourced e-mail services, the world won't be able to get enough local mail servers. And with a simple pricing system (no per-user licencing; you pay just once and have done with it. No danger that you'll be prevented from expanding your business simply because you can't afford to add extra users to your e-mail system) these ones will go like hot cakes.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
This seems like an obvious solution since free email exists and campuses don't need to provide this service. Just as campus no longer provides phone service since all students have cell phones.
And why would colleges ban free email, this seems very draconian.
Btw, I went to school in the old days where they had landlines in the dorms.
WhatMeWorry
My university is switching to GMail, but I'm sad. I'm going to miss our current Novell GroupWise and Internet Messaging Service, the inability to check my mail with an email client, my 20MB of space... Damn, the good old days are behind us. They really are.
>Why not require a valid e-mail address before the first day of school or during the admission process
Because, no joke, most incoming freshmen have no idea that email addresses that may sound good while in high school (actual example: hotsexychocolate69@yahoo.com) may not be good addresses for communicating with your pre-law professors. Schools require students to use school-sanctioned email in order to verify that the sender/recipient of an .EDU email address is who the school thinks they are.
Besides, even if the school required a valid email upon admission, students would then be responsible for keeping their mailboxes from filling up (they don't) and/or telling the school whenever they decide to change their email addresses every six weeks (unlikely).
My University outsourced email 3 out of 4 years. It also changed every single year, which was slightly annoying. Our first provider was slow (5 minutes to get logged in), our second was fast but had a horrible interface, the third was down far to often. Finally we got outlook webmail, which I personally dislike, since it looks like outlook but isn't functional like outlook. I would much rather have had gmail. Even with the first three outsourced providers our IT was working to keep things running, it's not that they were fixing network problems it's that they had to fight to get basic services.
It's noticeable that concerns about organizations which don't respect relevant laws or ignore privacy issues didn't rank highly with you. Technical concerns seem to take top priority, social concerns and legal responsibilities are almost absent from the discussion. And I don't think you're alone in this.
Do you have any concerns about the mismatch between the interests of a state-run educational facility (like a state college) which isn't (ostensibly) a for-profit institution and a commercial for-profit service provider? It wasn't long ago that a search provider thought it okay to 'anonymize' some search data and release search data. The anonymization process meant generating new IDs for the searches, but still allowed anyone who has the data to put together searches (so you had a pretty good idea that the same person made a particular set of searches) and find them based on what they searched for, which is what a couple reporters did.
Who takes responsibility when the private contractor screws up? Is part of the contract that the state is no longer at fault, despite that the deal couldn't have gone through without their approval? Are we just headed to another trip toward legalizing the unethical (like the US seems to be doing with legalizing the warrantless searches)? The harm that can come from releasing sensitive information is not easily repaired. I certainly hope it's not routine for students who see the college nurse to be emailed with their test results indicating they're overweight and at risk for a host of health problems (problems future employers might use against them when they seek a job). To frame these issues in terms of administrative hassle and college cost seems incomplete at best.
But even with technical concerns, what about locking you into software? Microsoft in particular, though this comes from many other proprietors as well, is widely known for using technical schemes to lock people into software that best serves the interests of the proprietor instead of the user. This didn't seem to rank highly in your concerns either, and I don't think that this concern registers with people until it is adversely affecting them (and then only some have the motivation to get out from under that trap; as Eben Moglen said a couple years ago at an FSF talk, it's hard to get people to change their word processor).
Seeing the discussion here and asking a few students in the building where I work about this, makes me think of how much more work there is to do to teach people to identify and value certain freedoms, consider privacy issues, corruption, and learn enough about how things work (in a purely non-technical sense) so that they can see past the glitzy ads promising handy features at low prices.
Digital Citizen
It's too bad that almost no one understands how absurd it is to discuss (and worry about) the privacy and security of email! Until you are sending email messages encrypted end-to-end, there's no point in even having that discussion.
Sorry, but this sounds like a personal problem to me. If you can get a license at the age of 16, if you want to go to college, if you want to make something out of yourself, then getting an e-mail and keeping the address for lousy several years should not be a problem. Then again, given the quality of U.S. public schools you may be right...