Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Saturday 22 November 2008, 10:08 AM
College gives up on email - corporates next?
The thinking behind this is that these days, every student has an established digital identity before they join. There's no reason for the college to provide an expensive email service which just gives the students an additional address that they won't use very much anyway, will take extra management and provides very little. The college looked at outsourcing email to Google or Microsoft - both of whom offer free education-targetted services which are becoming increasingly popular among college administrations - but decided even that level of service wasn't needed.
Colleges and universities have often led the way in corporate IT, being some of the first organisations to provide computer time, email and network access to their members. These moves, both to outsourcing email and to abandon it altogether, may well be replicated in commerical enterprises. After all, if your personal email is robust and secure, why do you want a second one?
It's a controversial choice, though. There are concerns about security, spam, compliance and maintenance: students often change their free email provider, for example, so how could the college be sure its important emails were getting through? The college is confident that these aren't serious issues and the benefits outweigh the disadvantages.
(I'm quite tempted to set my own corporate email to forward everything to my personal Gmail, by way of experiment. Anything that gets me away from the usability car-crash that is Outlook is worth a deal of pain...)
PreviousComments on this post
I think it makes a lot of sense...after all it only takes 2 minutes to set up a live/gmail/yahoo account. I've been encouraging people to do this for years now.
I like keeping my personal account separate from the one I have at work. I have a lot of interests at home that don't need to be further cluttered with email from work. I get SPAM in both but in situations when corporate communication is centered around something like a Sharepoint or Exchange server, not having a corporate email account shuts down a lot of basic functionality that is convenient to have.
If I was still operating self-employed I would probably still keep separate accounts. One for business, the other for home interests. Obviously working in the corporate world email is fairly important. A lot of communication from vendors and management is through email and I don't see that changing anytime soon. Here in the US if the company is large enough, Sarbanes-Oxley seems to have required caching email as part of the business documentation for regulation of the business. So I doubt that's going to change corporate thinking.
I'm not sure that corporations will be so easy to let Google or Microsoft datamine through all their email traffic. It would be a goldmine for corporate espionage or undermining trade treaties between between countries.
At a college, not offering email service makes sense. I'm not sure why they have to have an email forwarding service unless its a transitional device. Like maybe next year they will expect the freshmen to come in and have an email account established somewhere else. Just have them subscribe or register their email account on a college webpage.
The money angle makes a lot of sense. I got out of IT simply because everybody thinks their email is the most important thing and nobody gets it that its NOT the US Mail! There is no guarantee that email will get through, absolutely none. I got tired of Monday morning desktop crises when the email server hiccuped over the weekend or somebody deleted their entire inbox and wanted to blame me.
What I wish would change is a universally approved and implemented TCP protocol for sending encrypted/secure email. Yes it would require the sender and receiver to set up a password or some sort of secure transaction but if it turned out you wanted to stop reception just shut off the password or phrase for that "connection". It would require more infrastructure or software but the potential is that SPAM email could be completely ignored if desired.
Email is more than just a message delivery mechanism, though. It signifies membership. The only way you can get a .edu email account is if you're in the education system in some way, and there are certain privileges associated with that.
So you do want to have an email address that reflects your status - that's why I use my zdnet.co.uk email when I'm writing to someone on matters to do with the site. Be a bit odd doing it with Hotmail!
And yes, some sort of authenticated email would be nice. Trouble is, email works because it's so easy. Nobody's managed to create a simple, effective interface to manage authentication between multiple entities - I forget how many times i've tried to set up PGP email and given up.
I think the membership angle would still be covered by either the email header itself or allow the email header to convey the "view as" data.
PGP is a good idea and an excellent protocol but like you said no one has figureed out a way to incorporate it successfully into the email clients.
