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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)."
Anyone still afraid of things like this needs to chillax.
Ugh, nerds.
About a year and a semester ago, Temple University in Philadelphia did the same thing, right in the middle of the middle of the semester. Needless to say, this took many people by surprise, including me. The IT staff promised that all our old email would be backed up onto google and that the switchover would be flawless. It wasn't. For me, they did not migrate my emails, meaning that over 3 years of emails were lost. But that wasn't the worst of it. I would receive emails intermittently and many times not at all. No one could receive my outgoing ones, which meant that the work that I had done for a group project was not received by them. Of course I didn't know this at the time, I bought the party line. It was only after the teacher met with me and said that the group complained to him that I hadn't done any work for the group and failed me from the course right there. Now I was ignorant and should have contacted the group to make sure that they received my work but I was ignorant and stupid. It wasn't a problem for me to send emails before, but ever since then, the problems have remained. I use Google services as I would use a poison and in the hopes of understanding it, I will learn how to eradicate it from my life. I have grown to rely on a thing that I despise.
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.