Educause Security Discussion mailing list archives
Re: Discontinuing student email service
From: Jason Testart <jatestart () UWATERLOO CA>
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 2010 10:02:40 -0500
Matthew Gracie wrote:
Hall, Rand wrote:On the heels of another student email outsourcing question...it has occurred to me that some of us may want to step back and reflect on the following question: Why do we still provide student email accounts? We once provided labs full of typewriters and then computers. We used to provide our own dialup service. Once these things were commoditized we were able to largely eliminate them. Do student email accounts fall into the same lifecycle pattern?I can't speak for anyone else, but here at Canisius, the college-provided email address is an official point of contact for departments like the library, the registrar's office, and the bursar's office. It's used in our CMS, our class-specific email lists, and a dozen other places. Getting rid of it would mean either lots more postal mail or coming up with some backend database of student's voluntarily provided home email addresses. I shudder at the thought of maintaining that mess.
We've been maintaining "that mess" for a decade or more now. The email addresses are managed by our identity management system, which pushes the addresseses to an LDAP server. The MX server cluster for our domain forwards appropriately based on LDAP. We expect "userid () uwaterloo ca" to work, be it an on-campus or off-campus email server. In addition to the reasons above, we like to think that forcing students to have a university email address prepares them for the real world where one has a "work email" and a "personal email". Of course, the line between "work" and "personal" is getting fuzzy these days. jt -- Jason A. Testart, BMath | Voice: +1-519-888-4567 x38393 Manager, IT Security | Fax: +1-519-884-4398 Information Systems and Technology | http://ist.uwaterloo.ca/security University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3G1 CANADA
Current thread:
- Discontinuing student email service Hall, Rand (Jan 26)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: Discontinuing student email service Matthew Gracie (Jan 26)
- Re: Discontinuing student email service Ken Connelly (Jan 26)
- Re: Discontinuing student email service Charles Seitz (Jan 26)
- Re: Discontinuing student email service Jason Testart (Jan 26)
- Re: Discontinuing student email service Gregg, Christopher S. (Jan 26)
- Re: Discontinuing student email service Matthew Gracie (Jan 26)
- Re: Discontinuing student email service Michael J. Wheeler (Jan 26)
- Re: Discontinuing student email service Moore, Frank (Jan 26)
- Re: Discontinuing student email service Bob Bayn (Jan 26)
- Re: Discontinuing student email service Gregg, Christopher S. (Jan 26)
- Re: Discontinuing student email service Terence Ma (Jan 26)
- Re: Discontinuing student email service Michael J. Wheeler (Jan 26)
- Re: Discontinuing student email service Moore, Frank (Jan 26)
- Re: Discontinuing student email service Bob Bayn (Jan 26)
(Thread continues...)