Educause Security Discussion mailing list archives

Re: Discontinuing student email service


From: "Moore, Frank" <moorefx () LONGWOOD EDU>
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 2010 10:34:14 -0500

Gregg, 

Students get a Longwood e-mail account if their supervisor demonstrates a need (this assumes that they are not full 
time University employees but are full time students working in an office part time during the week). They are granted 
access once their supervisor approves. The access must be renewed each semester if needed. 

Faculty and staff who also take classes are not given a student account. 

Hope this helps, 

Frank Moore

F. X. Moore III, Ph.D.
Vice President for Technology, CIO and Chief Privacy Officer
Longwood University
201 High Street
Farmville, VA 23909

(434) 395-2034 [voice]
(434) 395-2035 [fax]

http://www.longwood.edu

Do not ever e-mail your password to anyone.
IITS will never ask for your password

-----Original Message-----
From: The EDUCAUSE Security Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU] On Behalf Of Gregg, 
Christopher S.
Sent: Tuesday, January 26, 2010 10:10 AM
To: SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU
Subject: Re: [SECURITY] Discontinuing student email service

Along those lines, what are the schools that have outsourced student e-mail doing for the following scenarios:

- Students who are student employees where they need "work" e-mail
- Faculty and staff who also take classes and then have a need for a "student" account

Are you creating multiple mailboxes for these people; a student account in the outsource location, and "work" account 
on the locally hosted system?  Are you just creating one account and if so which way are you leaning?

We're considering an outsourced solution and this is one the challenges we're talking through right now.  Obviously if 
you move everyone to an outsourced model this is not an issue, but we're not likely to move fac/staff at this time and 
we'd like to keep e-mail related to those functions here.  Right now everyone gets a locally hosted Exchange account 
which is slick for automation and integration, but can be messy when a person ends one role but not all roles with the 
university.

Thanks,

Chris


Chris Gregg
Director of Information Technology
Information Resources and Technologies
University of St. Thomas
St. Paul, Minnesota
csgregg () stthomas edu

-----Original Message-----
From: The EDUCAUSE Security Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU] On Behalf Of Jason 
Testart
Sent: Tuesday, January 26, 2010 9:03 AM
To: SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU
Subject: Re: [SECURITY] Discontinuing student email service

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

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