Re: [tlug] outsourcing email service

[Micheal Cooper <mcooper@example.com>]

stephen@example.com wrote:
> 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
>   

This is so true. Cellphone email is king in Japan for contacting young 
people, but it really doesn't work well. Also, the cell phone companies 
allow email addresses that are not allowed in normal email, screwing up 
communications.

> 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).
>
>   

I was doing that, but I had to stop forwarding because of spam. The spam 
would come to us and be forwarded to Yahoo or Gmail or X University, 
etc., and then it would bounce back with sometimes angry messages about 
us sending spam. In the end, we were inundated with bounced mail because 
of the spam the departed teachers were being sent.

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

I respect your experience, but I asked around at my school, and just 
about all the faculty say that they do all of their research-related 
email correspondence with a non-university account, and many of them 
simply forward school mail to Gmail or Yahoo, etc.

> In fact, for corporate internal communications, you probably want
> something that looks more like an issue tracker than email.
>   

No, I really think that is true, in some ways. I had the idea of 
institutional bulletin boards for conversation, which is sort of the 
same destination. A series of forums on the issues discussed in the 
email would be great, but each thread would have to have a membership 
list and not allow non-members to read it. The advantage would be 
archived and accessible histories of the discussions and work flow, but 
managing accessibility would be a nightmare.

> Steve "it's dangerous to invite me to speak theoretically" Turnbul

Actually, I enjoyed and appreciated it very much. Thank you.

I am not advocating any solution, but I am looking for other 
perspectives to help me think about the problem more creatively.

Micheal