Re: [tlug] outsourcing email service

["Micheal E. Cooper" <mcooper@example.com>]

Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
>     Micheal> A series of forums on the issues discussed in the email
>     Micheal> would be great, but each thread would have to have a
>     
>
> No, it's not even a dream.  It's called Roundup (still a SourceForge
> project, IIRC).  You'd have to do some hand-tuning, as shutting people
> out of threads they're not supposed to access is not a standard
> feature, but there are some suggestions about how to go about doing
> it.  Another issue tracker which is more industrial strength is RT,
> and Atlassian provides some superb commercial products including a
> wiki that integrates well with the issue tracker.
>
> Roundup may not be appropriate for you for quite some time; you'd need
> to get your hands dirty with Python plumbing, and there'd be
> substantial risk of leakage of sensitive information if you got the
> permissions wrong or some admin or faculty member did.

Thank you for the sobering cautionary note and the information. Having 
an institutional record of dialogues in forum or issue-tracker style For 
someone with proper resources (like time, talent, and team members) to 
pull it off, it sounds really good, but I don't have the time to work 
through it. However, I hope this thread benefits others looking for 
information.

To summarize:

The responses I have gotten seem from TLUG members are about 50-50 for 
and against outsourcing email.

CONS:
Control -- You lose control over one's own data. You don't know when it 
is backed up, how, and by whom.
Access -- You lose the utility of having direct access to user 
mailboxes. You can't retrieve from backup the absolutely essential email 
that so-and-so accidentally deleted from his inbox and then from his 
trash folder.
Security -- Your company's email is on another company's servers. You 
don't know who might be looking at it.
Service -- You have to rely on someone else to fix problems, so you 
don't know how fast issues will be resolved.
Choice -- You have to settle with the features offered by your email 
provider, rather than picking and installing your own.

PROS:
Cost -- A mail server used to be just a regular server with smtp, pop, 
imap, maybe httpd (for webmail) running on it, but now anti-virus and 
spam scanning has become more-or-less necessary, and these demands 
require better server hardware and more time to fine-tune. When you 
calculate in the cost of data transfer, electricity, hardware, 
maintenance, spam and virus filtering, backups, system performance 
tuning, and spam filter tuning, outsourcing email might very well be 
cheaper than doing it in-house.
Time -- If you have an IT staff, one person can be the Mail meister and 
keep up on blacklists, filtering technology, viruses, interfaces, etc., 
but if you are are understaffed and overburdened with various different 
responsibilities, you can't stay ahead of or even keep up with the 
spammers and virus writers yourself. A company doing email hosting can 
dedicate staff to keeping on top of these issues and still make a profit.

For myself, I agree completely that if your company has valuable data, 
like patent information, bulk customer information, strategic business 
plans, or similar information being transmitted through email, you 
should allocate the resources to equip yourself with scanners, filters, 
good hardware, talent, and person-hours sufficient to do the job well 
in-house. If you have something worth stealing in that mail, then your 
should protect it yourself. However, if your email is not THAT valuable, 
and your management does not provide sufficient resources, you should 
outsource it, because outsourcing will give you better protection 
against viruses and spam and better accessibility and usability for 
users than you could provide with the insufficient resources you have 
been given.

As a note, if you want privacy + outsourced email, use GNU Privacy Guard 
or PGP. Worried about Google scanning your email? Encrypt it, and let 
them scan away! It would be fun to see what ads Google pulls into the 
Gmail sidebar when you send an encrypted email. Maybe Martian furniture 
porn, or Pee-Wee Herman fan sites. Come to think about it, some of those 
might overlap.

Micheal