Re: Discontinuing student email service

[Jason Testart <jatestart () UWATERLOO CA>]

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

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