Re: Discontinuing student email service - back to the original question

[Anna Kircher <Anna.Kircher () HUMBOLDT EDU>]

We have a campus policy that declares email as an official form of communication with students, that their humboldt.edu 
account is their official email address for university communications, and requires them to monitor their HSU email 
account in order to receive critical information from the institution.  While we do allow students to forward their 
email, the policy specifies that we are not responsible for what happens to email after it leaves our system, and they 
are still responsible/accountable for reading it. 



Students have a self-navigational tool for setting up forwarding to another account if they want; we aren't in the 
middle of having to track that. 



There's more than one technological strategy for achieving this functionality - but we maintain HSU provided email 
accounts so that we (a) KNOW that every student has one; (b) can simplify the work of creating/maintaining/selecting 
distribution lists for different communiques; (c) can verify that email was delivered to them and when; (d ) know that 
original delivery isn't hampered by blacklisting or rate hampering by external providers; and (e ) can provide high 
assurances regarding privacy for that original delivery. 



What the students want to do with email after it arrives in their HSU inbox  is their business.  :-) 



Anna 


Anna Kircher 
Chief Information Officer 
Humboldt State University 
One Harpst Street 
Arcata, CA 95521 
707-826-3815 




--------------- 

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? 



Cheers, 
Rand 

-- 
Rand P. Hall * Director, Network Services 
Merrimack College * SunGard Higher Education 
315 Turnpike Street, North Andover MA 01845 * Tel 978-837-5000 
Fax 978-837-5383 * rand.hall () merrimack edu * www.sungardhe.com

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