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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 ignorant of the possible problems of things like this need to become educated.
Ugh, idiots.
I was a grad student there, and most of the people I knew hated the Horde webmail interface. I practically never used it, since I've always set up IMAP.
My current university also outsources most of their student e-mail services to Google... again, I almost always access it through IMAP. The main downside I've run into is that the university version of Gmail doesn't have access to Labs features that you get with regular Gmail.
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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), but don't forget to delete your mail off the university's shitty server once a week or you'll get everything bounced!
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Whatever they decide to do, some people are going to complain. The gmail-based service lets people use POP and IMAP so they can use a different UI if they want. So you've got real flexibility, and a default UI that (in most people's opinions) doesn't suck. So... what was the problem again?
When I was with their dept of psychiatry at the med school, they had terrible problems with constantly infected and reinfecting machines, both theirs and customers'. They had good admins, but couldn't keep up. With email farmed out, perhaps they can tackle the problem now.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Harvard, just to spite Yale, has switched its mail system over to Yahoo! Mail. Also, 3 MIT students are currently being investigated for breaking into the accounts of the presidents of both universities and sending out notices to their entire university saying that the cafeteria systems at their universities had recently added a free bar.
I am officially gone from
Tell me, please: what is almost impossible about running a distributed mail server cluster for a few tens of thousands of users and 100% cluster uptime? This has been a common achievement implemented using VAXclusters in academia since the '80s, so I'm curious as to what's gone wrong with engineering ability since then.
I get this impression sometimes that people think 100% availability via "cloud" distributed computing is an invention of this century. The only thing that's new is assuming that all but a few large corporations are sufficiently competent to do something that local IT was expected to do: then with expensive, hard-to-replace machines.
You don't like your email being read by someone else? Then why are you sending it as a postcard? And if you don't care about that then who cares if Google reads it and sells the information to advertisers?
FireGPG and others make encrypting webmail easy, and PGP/GPG and SMIME have been integrated into most mail clients for years.
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Anybody doing any sort of human research, say from the medicine, biomedical and psychology faculties, shouldn't be using GMail, because it involves sending privileged information to a third party corporation and, in this case, a corporation that has a vested interest in using the information they're gathering.
Outside of that, many people like to protect their own privacy.
You're just making up what Google does with that data.
http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=60762
It's pretty easy to create a robust mail server cluster.
It's significantly more difficult to do it at the price Google is offering.
I'm an IT manager at a major University.
okay... so the thing is, everyone loves gmail. They love it because it's a pretty, intuitive interface, they have good spam filtering, it's free, plenty of storage, hugely distributed servers for good and reliable performance, nifty features, lots of happy fun time. Why *wouldn't* you switch your whole IT mail system to gmail?
You wouldn't do it because google's entire business model is based on profiting from the content of your data. Mining that
data for targeted advertising (yes, even if they're not displaying ads in your gmail, they are mining your data for useful stuff to sell to advertisers), gleaning useful tidbits about your behavior and buying practices, etc., etc. They *own*
the content of your email.
If you are working on potentially profitable research, you'd be insane to collaborate on it through google.
If you are handling privacy-sensitive data (such as student records), you'd be insane to communicate that data
through google.
If you are handling any other sensitive information (like passwords to financial accounts, potentially embarrassing
internal memos, career- or relationship- destroying office gossip), you'd be insane to communicate it through google.
GOOGLE READS YOUR EMAIL. When you sign up with google, you AGREE TO LET THEM DO IT FOR FUN AND PROFIT.
They are providing this service for free -- if something goes wrong and they lose a bunch of your data, they'll have
a minor public relations black eye and move on. You'll be out a bunch of valuable data. You can't fire anyone,
you can't take tangible measures to make sure it doesn't happen again (or that it doesn't happen in the first place), etc.
There are lots of reasons NOT to take your IT mail to google. It's mostly about data security, privacy, and accountability.
You are surrendering all of that when you go to google. If those things aren't important to you, then by all means, switch to google.
And I'm not saying this just because I'm not anxious to have my job outsourced. I'm saying it because after 20 years of
being responsible for this sort of data, giving it to google is one of the worst things you could do with it. It's not all about "Easy interface, low cost", but unfortunately anyone who ISN'T responsible for managing the data only sees those two things.
Oh, yeah... and universities don't generally prioritize storage/systems/personnel for student email. TFA talks about saving 12 TB of space, which these days I could install new (and reliably) for well under $10k, if someone was willing to spend the money on it.
If google provided free software to run a webmail system locally, now THAT's something I could get behind. THAT is what
Universities should be trying to get google to provide. Let them provide the interface, and let your local guys set it up and manage the data, keep the storage servers local.
YMMV, especially if your local IT guys just suck. :)
All of the issues they're clamoring over are completely non-unique. The simple fact that Google is giving Yale their Google Mail service for free is an advantage that cannot be glossed over in one sentence (as these authors did) for the following reasons:
This doesn't include the fact that no system, regardless of how well it's put together, is immune to the occassional outage. One can argue that administrators don't have much control over fixing an outage on Google's turf, but they have shown consistently that they can get everything back in working order extremely quickly. Plus, being able to manage millions of accounts (which include calendaring and contact storage for almost every account) while retaining extremely reliable levels of uptime is impressive.
I think the only reason why large-scale corporations haven't considered doing the same is to retain compliance. (Legal would never allow it).
I work for a higher-ed institution, and we recently provided a university-sponsored GMail option. We heard this issue about sending private data via GMail, from some folks in our health departments.
Our response was: why are you emailing anything with private data in it!?
Email of any kind, whether run locally at the department level, institution-wide at the central IT level, or outsourced to someplace like Google ... Email is an inherently insecure transport method. You don't send private data over the Internet. Period.
So, let me amend your statement:
Anybody doing any sort of human research, say from the medicine, biomedical and psychology faculties, shouldn't be using email, because it involves sending privileged information over the Internet.
It's called outsourcing, contractors and management.
I work at a University that has recently outsourced their student e-mail to GMail. The University IT group has really bad management. There is a CIO, 3 Vice Presidents and 5 directors for an IT group roughly 300 people with 70% of them being contractors. Each group within the IT group (Exchange, Unix, NT, Mail, Helpdesk, Networking...) has their own 1 or 2 managers.
Of course when it's time to look for a solution, the contractors love to propose their 'appliances' and 'do-it-all software' with 'vendors' and 'partners' because their contracting companies are being sponsored by those companies. That's why we have Exchange with Quest Extensions ($25000/server for a piece of software that only SHOWS the flow of e-mail on a pretty screen), NetApp storage at $5/GB/year, PeopleSoft, Microsoft SMS/WSUS with Quest Extensions (so you can attempt to use WSUS on a Mac bound to Active Directory and Novell Linux bound to Active Directory - Solaris and Debian what's that), some random companies DHCP server appliances - $2500 for a piece of hardware that only does DHCP based on the open source dhcpd, a paid version of SysLog (the actual open source syslog-ng software) with licensing based on logs per hour.
Management thinks that this is normal and the way to do business. Of course their overhead is so large that hardly anybody uses their services as it is cheaper to get your own sysadmin and invest in hardware. So University IT supports about 20 of the smallest departments - those that are too small to pay for a single sysadmin, they need about 200 people to do that job (the other 100 are in networking, server admins and telephone)
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I work for a higher-ed institution that's in the Big Ten. We recently provided GMail on campus, to all faculty, students, and staff. It was a remarkably easy transition for us to make. Here's how we did it:
Opt-in.
Really, that was it. We said, "Here's the GMail system that we arranged through Google and the University. If you want to move to GMail, please do - here's a link to make that happen. If you prefer to remain on the existing University email system, that's fine, we aren't taking that away and we're still committed in supporting the University system."
It's worked out well. As of last week, our overall adoption rate is 26% across faculty and staff (I don't have the student numbers) with several colleges and departments already at 100%. Overall, students opted in very quickly. Our outliers have been staff and faculty - this is likely because moving to GMail is a change, and change can be scary. (Note you can use the web interface, or access GMail using POP/IMAP.)
It's not entirely opt-in, though. Incoming students are not given an option - they'll be issued a University GMail account by default. The goal is that over the next 4 years, we'll gradually have all student accounts move to GMail automatically. (But as I said, students tended to opt-in very quickly.)
If the schools email system failed to properly send your class assignments and you didnt receive emails properly,
you should have contacted the university and appealed your grade. At the very least the university would have
allowed you to retake the class without cost or GPA penalty. You couldnt have been the only person in school this happened to.
You may still be able to appeal if nothing else to just get the F removed from your transcript(I assume to retook the course).
If you kept your emails since then you can print out your email directory where the old emails are missing.
Maybe someone better informed than I could say whether or not if using Gmail corporate services would also expose you to randomly-applied 'great ideas' such as the screwup that is Buzz?
In a word, No.
When my university moved to GMail, the central IT folks get to administer the university GMail system. [Disclaimer: I work in our central IT, but am not part of the GMail team, although I am in the same overall unit.] That means the university central IT gets to choose what new add-ons our users get access to. So, central IT gets to be the gatekeeper for new stuff that appears in Labs, or new bolt-ons like Buzz. In our university, I believe we use a pretty vanilla GMail. This is (mainly) to help with support issues, but privacy concerns like Buzz probably play into this too.
Incidentally, it's the same with corporations that use GMail, IIRC. Except in that case, the corporation is paying $$$ to Google to be hosted on GMail. But the corporate IT staff still manage the featureset for things like Labs and Buzz.
Email is an inherently insecure transport method.
This statement was true in the mid 90's. It is no longer universally true.
Using techniques such as opportunistic SMTP over TLS, a.k.a. SMTPS, it is possible to provide link-level encryption of email without requiring any special configuration on the part of the end user. This setup is more common than you think, especially in universities. I would estimate that about half of all US universities already deploy SMTPS. Email traveling over SSL/TLS is not that bad from a security point of view -- the only way to intercept it is to compromise a mail server or one of the end users' machines, and if a hacker has that level of access, you have much bigger problems than email.
SMTPS will not encrypt the link between the MUA and the MTA. For that, the end user needs to explicitly configure IMAPS or POP3S. However, this link is one of the easiest links in the chain to secure, even without cryptography. Ethernet switches (not hubs) and physical access control will prevent the vast majority of local sniffing attacks, and WPA2 is good enough for WiFi links.
You don't send private data over the Internet. Period.
I disagree with this statement. At the very least, it is almost impossible to function in modern society without sending private data over the Internet in some form. For example, if you never send your credit card number over the internet, then e-commerce is almost impossible, and if a merchant subscribed to this philosophy, he would not remain in business. As another example, you almost certainly had to send your slashdot password over the internet in order to log in, and you probably consider it to be private (if not, feel free to tell me what it is).
I agree that you should never send unencrypted private data over the Internet, but I would stop well short of recommending a complete ban on sending even encrypted private data, which is what you seem to be saying.
When one of the top public universities already switched?
Email at UVa: Account Choices
Account choices:
- Students: Microsoft Live and/or Gmail
- Alumni: Gmail
- Faculty/Staff/Special cases: Exchange and/or CMS (former mail system)
It's probably cheaper to outsource e-mail providers, but UVA still maintains control of the @virginia.edu domain and forwards e-mail to Live or G-mail.
There are a number of good reasons for *not* hosting your own email.
None of this precludes the fact that there are compliance and privacy issues surrounding email. FERPA, HIPPA, GLB, SOX, and Privacy Act may all apply. It's not an easy decision. There are at least as many factors supporting retained hosting. Outsourcing student email hosting can make a lot of sense. I don't recommend outsourcing faculty/staff email for an educational institution, but there are certainly a lot of reasons to consider it.
Using techniques such as opportunistic SMTP over TLS [wikipedia.org], a.k.a. SMTPS, it is possible to provide link-level encryption of email without requiring any special configuration on the part of the end user.
That definitely helps, but on the other hand you don't know all of what happens to email in transit. If I send you an email, I might know that my server is pretty secure, but I don't really know how many servers the mail will be routed though, what the security policies might be on those servers, or even whether they might be compromised. And then I don't know whether you're using encryption for SMTP/IMAP on your client end.
So while I might say you can secure email within your organization pretty well, once it's going over the Internet, email isn't very secure-- not unless you're using something like GPG.
Gmail does not implement IMAP standard correctly. I am aware of two currently existing problems (and there were more iirc): ENVELOPE response is occasionally misformed for more complex messages. Gmail sends EXPUNGE unsolicited responses when it is forbidden by the standard. Gmail sends the responses to some queries out of order - this behaviour is formally correct but is not what some IMAP clients expect. Still, many IMAP clients which use IMAP in a POP fashion and never - or rarely - encounter these problems. Try using a more sophisticated IMAP client which makes an effort to optimize the amount of transferred data and keeps long-lived network connections the way IMAP was designed for - and you will understand what the grandparent had in mind.
Gmail does not implement IMAP standard correctly. ... Gmail sends the responses to some queries out of order - this behaviour is formally correct but is not what some IMAP clients expect.
So Gmail is correctly implemented but the clients aren't and you blame Gmail?