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Yale Switching To Gmail, Not Without Opposition
PwnSnake writes "While it makes sense for small (and large) corporations to move to Gmail, something seems amiss when a top private university decides to hand everything over to Google. Although most in that community seem to welcome the change, several organizations on campus have joined forces to call for a transparent process and get students and faculty thinking about the downsides of the switch. The problem is choice (users can already forward mail to Gmail; it doesn't make sense to force that option and not have a backup or opt-out mail server)."
God, I wish my university would do this. We have 40MB account limits and professors routinely send out 10MB worth of attachments. Sure, you can forward it all to gmail (and who doesn't) [...]
I thought I'd point out something that most students are unaware of: When you sign up for your own @gmail.com account, you give up ownership of your email. It's in the use agreement.
This is an important point, because when the university makes an agreement with Google, there's a whole legal process behind it. The university retains the ownership over the email; Google is just the provider. That's how we did it at our university.
Here's the distinction: Did Google (or Yahoo, or Microsoft, or any other webmail provider) mess up and accidentally let someone else view your @gmail.com account? Oops, too bad - but that was really Google's data, not yours. You can get angry at them, but you don't really have any legal recourse. But if Google makes that error for a contractual hosted customer (like University GMail) it's Google's problem, and there's a legal process to go with it. With the legal contractual stuff in there, the university has some protection.
I work in central IT for a large university. [Disclaimer: I'm not on the GMail team.] We knew that many students (and a bunch of faculty, staff) were forwarding their university email to their own @gmail.com account, because GMail was easier for them to use. But these same people just weren't aware that they were giving up their email. Not usually a problem for students, but it's a bigger deal for the university when staff and faculty do it. So it was very important when the university made arrangements with Google for our University GMail system. It's still GMail, you can still use the GMail web interface (or POP/IMAP), but we've taken care of the legal stuff on the back-end so the university retains ownership and is protected.