Re: [tlug] outsourcing email service

[<stephen@example.com>]

Micheal Cooper writes:

 > How about just closing the college email to the outside?

That takes your college out of the collegial society of academia.  Bad
idea for a college, especially in this country where they need all the
practice they can get in getting outside their boxes.

 > All the students and all the teachers have free email accounts
 > anyway,

Are you sure?  My colleagues do all have and use outside email
addresses, although in some cases (like mine) they're probably just
virtual mailboxes forwarded to their university accounts.  That
doesn't really matter, though, it does end up on a PC somewhere.

The students are another matter.  I would say that in my experience,
the majority of their non-university addresses are cellphones.
They're basically inadequate for communicating anything except
commands and tete-a-tete appointments.  Even if you want to schedule 3
or 4 people, some kind of table is very useful, but cellphones display
them badly and are impossibly poor platforms for manipulating them.

 > they use them more than the in-house email because they can take
 > those accounts with them when they leave.

This is a temporary phenomenon, because of the advertising value of
domain names.  Essentially all technical and semitechnical (eg,
economics) societies provide virtual mailboxes, as do all the Ivy
schools and other first-rank universities.  Even for employees, I'm
pretty sure you cannot reach me now as "Turnbull.1@example.com",
but I would be very surprised if that has been reassigned to another
OSU employee.  In U.S. academia anyway I would be willing to bet that
most universities would be willing to forward mail indefinitely for
former faculty (at least).

 > A company or a university providing an email address used to be the only 
 > way to get one, but now everyone has multiple addresses, and it is 
 > managing all of these different contact routes that complicates
 > things.

Sure, but cellphones don't make it easier.  My students change their
cellphone addresses frequently, and they do the same with yahoo and
hotmail addresses.

 > making a clear separation between work and private lives, and

This is not possible in academia.  Companies and government often have
that option, but academics, rarely.

 > ensuring that intra-company info never leaves the company network.

Well, if I were running a company communications network, I'd
seriously think about simply not having email for internal
communications.  It would look like email to the users, and the
notification might arrive by SMTP, but the message bodies and
attachments would all be external MIME bodies and/or URLs.  (IMAP is
basically the same concept, but use of URLs would allow the system to
be distributed at a higher level.)  This would get rid of the "DoS
attack by internal memo to everybody" phenomenon, as well as the "DoS
attack by sending copies of attachments until users of Macs, Windows,
and Un*x users all report being able to read it".  If people want
local copies, they could make them, but usually it's not worth it.

In fact, for corporate internal communications, you probably want
something that looks more like an issue tracker than email.
Especially considering the abysmal job of threading and more generally
classification that is done by most MUAs, not to mention the large
number of administrative and other staff who seem to think that the
combination of "事務連絡" and "緊急連絡" is a sufficiently large
repertoire of subject lines.

Steve "it's dangerous to invite me to speak theoretically" Turnbull