Do you have to deal with this kind of thing?Īs someone who has to deal with this stuff on a daily basis - I had dealings regarding CalMail last week on a similar mail related problem of their's - and with academic mail systems in general, let me clue you in: It's not just as simple as setting the mx to point to a 'working host', especially not in academia (though many try). If it were easy, there'd be no push to outsource it to 'the Cloud' (or anywhere else), and countless organizations wouldn't be moving from the 'burden' of administering something like Exchange (ie, a trivial amount of knowledge is required compared to any other MTA) to Office 365 or Google. Guess I was never learned at that school of capacity 'planning'.īelieve it or not, maintaining a mail host for a larger, geographically diverse That slideshow is pure management-spin right from the opening 'look how complicated and difficult this is.' I love how the 'solution' to a system that is soon to outstrip its capacity is to stop expanding (and, it appears, properly maintaining) said system and hope it doesn't implode before you can toss the potato to an external party (who can then take the blame). Perhaps someone with more inside knowledge than I have can fill in and/or correct information from both sides of the story. I've heard that some departments have been able to resurrect their internal systems to get through the outage. There was some griping about the costs for central services often exceeding the internal costs the departments formerly had but there was, I'm told, much need to justify the expense of and to pay for the new center. When the campus built its centralized computing services facility, there was great pressure on departments to move to the central system. I've only heard from people on one side of this but the story that I hear is that in the past, many departments had their own IT, mail servers, web, etc. Google does not have the best interests of academia in mind when it sets its policies, nor is there any reason for Google to care about academic needs. It is easy to say, 'Well, it is not like Google is going to demand something outrageous!' but there is really nothing preventing Google from doing so (if you do not think they have done so already). Students and faculty have essentially no power over the terms of use that Google or Microsoft or any other third party email service imposes on them.

Students and faculty can demand changes to university policy if the policy does not properly align with the academic mission of the institution. Typically universities have acceptable computer policies and at those institutions that run their own mail servers, such policies usually govern email.

However, I have a separate issue with outsourcing student email: third parties get to set the rules for student conduct without any action by the university itself.

Since both my alma mater and my current institution have migrated to Google, and both are covered by FERPA and other privacy laws, I am inclined to say that that argument is bogus.

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