University Migrating Students to Windows Live Mail? 450
An anonymous reader wonders: "My University has begun a migration of student email services to Windows Live Mail. All students will be forced onto the system by the end of the semester, but it doesn't support POP or IMAP. Because of that limitation, the only freely available mail client it supports is Windows Live Desktop, which is only available on Windows and I'm worried its ads might be vulnerable to malware just like the ones in Live Messenger. I depend on my mail client and I am concerned about this, because we're not allowed to forward our mail but are responsible for information received there from the University and classes, I'm not on a Windows machine, and I don't have the time to regularly check for web-mail, during the day." What are the pros and cons of such a move for a mid-sized or large college? If you were in charge of the communications of a such a university, would you outsource [please note the vendor neutrality, here] your e-mail?
Has anyone else's tech department migrated to Windows Live Mail? Why did they make that decision, and how did it work out for the students? For those of us who have already switched our accounts with no way to revert, what ways exist to get around the lack of POP and still use a client? Is there any hope we can get the University to change back or Microsoft to implement POP before the semester's end? How does your University manage their email?"
POP access (Score:5, Informative)
Please check out Thunderbird (Score:4, Informative)
Good luck.
I wish they would outsource! (Score:2, Informative)
Reason for the university to do it. I've talked with the folks running this and there are a bunch. 1) It's much cheaper to outsource your email than to run your own servers. 2) Re-purposing email servers to all those new services that you'd love to offer...like perhaps a library of recordings of lectures. 3) Long term relationships - While current student's email would be ad-free, the university could allow people to keep their school email accounts forever as long as they went ad-supported after graduation. That has a lot of benefits for the school community and may help them improve donations.
Personally I'm going to see if I can get in on the trial of this. I'd love to keep my email address from the university for a while, especially while I'm looking for a job after I graduate.
Google Apps (Score:2, Informative)
2GB of space. POP3. Spam filtering. Cost? $0.
I use a .forward file at my school just because the local mail is so unreliable (downtime, messages lost, etc.). Even *that* has been a liability when they have managed to crash their RAID array and not have a backup. That was when final projects were due, too. And they limit us to 250 megabytes total on the system. Oh how I yearn for the day they will here my humble petitions and switch to Google Apps.
Re:Do they supply free Windows? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Which university? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Which university? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Contact them (Score:4, Informative)
You can also define externals contacts. You can install connectors to view Calendars from Notes Organizations, etc. pp.
Step spewing nonsense.
Re:Does Google support IMAP yet? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Which university? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Sounds Dubious (Score:5, Informative)
Get what you pay for -- free email hosting from MS (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Does Google support IMAP yet? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Sounds Dubious (Score:1, Informative)
School News Paper Article [uiargonaut.com]
Policy forbiding the forwarding to no uidaho.edu accounts [uidaho.edu]
This is the same school that requires you to register your laptops MAC address to get on the network. Yes. they use MAC filtering as if it actually worked.
Re:Does Google support IMAP yet? (Score:3, Informative)
IMAP would make sense, though, since you could access to the gmail account with your favorite client. Nevertheless, since gmail does not use folders (uses labels) I guess they do not offer IMAP because of that lack (heh, they say it is a feature
Re:POP access (Score:5, Informative)
IMAP vs POP: Folders vs Flags; threading (Score:1, Informative)
Another IMAP extension does support message threading & I'm unaware of a similar POP spec.
So, IMAP access would be able to preserve more gmail features than POP!
Re:Contact them (Score:4, Informative)
And the GP's reply was correct. Whomever thinks Exchange cannot forward email to an external (non-Exchange) server just doesn't know anything about Exchange, (or how to use Google or the MS-KB either!).
Not that I'm advocating using Exchange mind you, I still think it sucks/blows majorly for a whole host of reasons, but the above sorts of statements are just painfully ignorant.
Re:Get what you pay for -- free email hosting from (Score:3, Informative)
Free, huge storage, POP3, all kinds of rules you can make, excellent SPAM filtering (way better than MSN), and Google has another service that offers free web hosting.
A new feature being gradually implemented (I think be seniority) is the ability to check other POP3 accounts from Gmail. Gmail also has the best AJAX interface in existence, IMHO.
Re:Get what you pay for -- free email hosting from (Score:3, Informative)
Who needs freaking MS and their "Live*" crap? Apparently not the IT department, whose natural instinct would have been to pile on more MS junk but they went the Gmail route because whatever solution they picked would have had to work on the Macs at WU too.
The Googleplex has made recent decisions I would have to categorize as "evil." However, I cannot argue with the fact that their stuff just WORKS, period. I for one welcome our Googleplex overlords. However I wish they'd grow more of a spine in dealing with Big Media.
Re:Contact them (Score:2, Informative)
Another poster did reply to this, but the explanation they gave was a little terse and probably meaningless to someone who doesn't actually use Exchange.
We use Exchange at work, and there's basically two ways to forward mail to another user outside the domain. Firstly, if all you want to do is forward user@exchangedomain.com to user@gmail.com, you can create a contact which has the address user@exchangedomain.com in its list of email addresse (on the E-mail Addresses tab of the contact's properties in Active Directory Users and Computers). Then you set their real SMTP address to user@gmail.com in the Exchange General tab. With this setup, Exchange will accept mail for them using any of the addresses listed in the E-mail Addresses list, and forward it to user@gmail.com.
The second way is if you want to forward email for a user's Active Directory account (i.e. a user object rather than a contact object). In this case, you go to the Exchange General tab, click on the Delivery Options button, and then select another user or contact to forward their mail to. This has to exist in the directory, so to forward it to an external address you still need to create a contact (as above).
Yes, it's a little convoluted but it works fine. However, it's not really end-user accessible. You could of course set up an OU which users can create contacts in, and give them permission to modify their own forwarding options [altRecipient and deliverAndRedirect], and then make a nice pretty GUI around the whole process. It's probably not worth the hassle to most organisations (and likely there's commercial products which provide this functionality for those who need it).