University Migrating Students to Windows Live Mail?

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?"

Contact them

[Nightspirit]

The program is still in beta (why the university is going with a beta product I have no idea).
Use this form to contact them and tell them what you want (pop, imap support, or whatever).
http://feedback.msn.com/eform.aspx?productkey=mail beta&locale=en-us [msn.com]

yes and no

[oohshiny]

Outsourcing mail makes sense, but outsourcing to a service that doesn't support POP or IMAP doesn't.

Your university might want to consider outsourcing to Google Mail...

Uh, complain?

[suso]

Don't waste your time asking about it on Slashdot. You should be writing to the president of your University and make him aware of your concerns. If they don't change, transfer to another college.

Which university?

[DoofusOfDeath]

Which university?

Ludicrous, idiotic, stupid, corrupt

[SpaceLifeForm]

Well, those are my immediate thoughts.

When word gets out what University is comtemplating
this, well, I would not want to be associated with
the decision.

Here's a suggestion

[Anonymous Coward]

I know people are going to think I'm flaming...

But:

- Shut up.
- Don't worry about your email.
- Focus on your education.
- Don't make webmail out to be more complicated than it is, all you gotta do is click on a bookmark and type your password into a box.
- The Windows Live Mail team put extensive effort into making this a product that got past the "Optimized for IE" barrier that past MS shit tended to do.

Just stop worrying about something so trivial, let the Uni IT department do their job, and focus on getting yourself through college and into the real world where you can make a difference on shit such as this later on.

My experience as a student and campus IT admin.

[jerbenn]

I work at a mid-size university and we outsource student email services to a state run provider. From my experience as both an IT admin and a student, I find that most student's don't use their campus provided email anyway......rather resorting to using their own personal accounts with hotmail, google, etc... The wise thing to do in my opinion is provide some sort of email service (outsourced is fine) for the small percent of students who actually use it, and allow student's to submit their own email addresses to the campus database.......which would then get loaded into the 'official' campus address book for use by faculty and other students.......

You have my sympathy

[dan dan the dna man]

I work at a University where Exchange dominates proceedings, like many other institutions. Watching staff and students stampede away from it when they realise there is an IMAP alternative when they are told about it (fine yes Exchange supports IMAP but the Uni's implementation does not) is quite heartening.

If they tried this at my institution there would be riots quite frankly - does everyone in your CS department run Windows? Even in the Biology departments not everyone runs Windows! I certainly couldn't accept this kind of situation occurring for staff, so I wouldn't therefore accept it occurring for students. In a world where the concept of choice is so readily bandied about as being 'a good thing' this is a retrograde step, regardless of who the vendor is.

Of course many of the students and staff already forward their email en masse to Gmail and either store it/deal with it there..

Outsource to Microsoft?!?

[cazbar]

If I were in a position of authority over a University network, would I outsource the email? Absolutely.

Would I outsource it to Microsoft? Not a chance in hell.

I'd find a company whose primary focus is email. That way I could expect some kind of service.

Re:Uh, complain?

[maynard]

Uhhh. Why should he bother changing university (and job) over IT email policy? Even if he doesn't like the email service, doesn't run Windows, and won't ever use it - why does that warrant transfer to a new school? Perhaps there are other compelling reasons why he might want to stay. For example, he has a girlfriend there; he has a good relationship with a certain professor who is willing to help his career path; he might lose transfer credits in the process; etc etc etc.

Your suggestion seems a tad excessive, IMO.

What are the specific requirements?

[khasim]

As with any project, you have to determine the specific requirements before you can even THINK of looking at vendors.

#1. Must support pop3 - will test using clients X, Y & Z.

#2. Must support imap - will test using clients X, Y & Z.

#3. Must support 1 & 2 with encryption - will test using clients X, Y & Z.

etc.

It is the requirements that make or break projects. Determine the requirements and how you'll be testing to see if those requirements will be met and THEN you can start looking at which vendors can meet those requirements (and testing to see that they actually DO meet them).

Re:Uh, complain?

[gnud]

Guys, why is every Ask Slashdot item answered with "dont waste your time on slashdot, instead go bug $some_seemingly_appropriate_person". If that is you attitude, just dont read any "Ask Slashdot" threads. Perhaps he just wants ammunition for his blazing letter to the university board =)

Re:No POP service?

[wile_e8]

Why can't they just offer POP service to those who want it?

Because then you could use non-Microsoft products to access your mail.

Re:Contact them

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft is fully aware that any modern email server should support POP and IMAP. But you have to be ignorant of Microsoft's business practices to not see what the facts show -- the program (meant in a general sense) here makes it so one's email is held captive in a Microsoft-only format. Not just your data is captive -- in order to view your data you also have to use a computer running Windows. This is also known as, why the fuck did the United States not complete its prosecution of Microsoft and prevent these illegal business practices. Notice the last: you cannot forward your email. You cannot forward your email. Microsoft does the exact same thing on their Exchange email server -- no email forwarding allowed. But then, you have to know that Microsoft makes its money by charging a tiered price for the amount of data in each account. You won't end up with a lot of data in your account if you forward your email. So, guess what, with Microsoft you do not get to.

You also won't end up locked in.

The correct answer to the student's questions is to go to a different school. Its institution's staff IT people are obviously incompetent or getting kickbacks if they are going with this "solution" that, like Windows Vista (makes XP look like a dream), gets in your way. Microsoft's products are become a severe hinderance to productivity.

Re:Uh, complain?

[modecx]

Uhhh. Why should he bother changing university (and job) over IT email policy? Even if he doesn't like the email service, doesn't run Windows, and won't ever use it - why does that warrant transfer to a new school?

I would probably think about it if I were in this position, and weren't especially attached to that school, and here's why: an action as poorly thought out as this one is surely not the only silly thing the school has done or will do in the near future. In other words, stupidity is almost positively endemic to the culture of the university, and only it's going to get worse before it gets better... The only way it's going to get better is if customers (students) vote with their money.

Plus, I just wouldn't want my professional reputation to be tied to a university with a habit of making idiotic moves like this, most especially if I were attending for some technology related degree.

Re:Uh, complain?

[aardvarkjoe]

In other words, stupidity is almost positively endemic to the culture of the university...

Stupidity is positively endemic to the culture of any university.

Re:yes and no

[Rinisari]

Utilize the school's student newspaper. Write a letter to the editor, if not a guest editorial. Most editors are cool and will let you write the editorial, as long as you keep it constructive and cite specific examples and sources while keeping it professional and logical. Another option is flyering the campus, but that's a little more difficult at a university of 20,000+ than a college of ~1,500.

Re:yes and no

[Anonymous Coward]

You're forgetting about something, though. Microsoft give huge discounts and tons of free stuff to colleges, therefore the colleges have raging boners for Microsoft.

For example, before I finished my AS degree in programming last year, half of my classes had the word "Microsoft" in the title. When I had office classes, it was exclusively Microsoft Office. When I had C and C++ classes, it was required to use Visual Studio .NET (the solution file was required). I had to have Visual Basic and C#. The database design classes required Microsoft SQL Server. The web classes required the use of Microsoft Frontpage (I got points taken off an assignment for doing it by hand, even though it validated 100% as XHTML 1.0 strict and 100% CSS2 and rendered exactly as it was supposed to). The website we had to upload the homework to only worked with IE6. The only class I had that wasn't Microsoft-centric was Java, but they made sure to make it seem bad by comparison. Notepad was the only editor we were allowed to use in class, had to use the command line (I love the UNIX command line, but can barely tolerate the DOS/NT command line), only wrote command line programs, etc.

As a student, I got free licenses for Office 2003, XP Professional, Visual Studio .NET 2005, SQL Server, Frontpage, Project, Visio, and others. This ensures that students are only exposed to and only know Microsoft products.

Microsoft is probably offering the use of Windows Live Mail for free (or very cheap) so that students will think that Microsoft == Email.

Re:Which university?

[coleridge78]

All of your replies make it obvious that you have no idea how a University (or probably any organization of over ten members) functions. No offense. You may be a frustrated student, which I can understand. I sounded similar once upon a time. Here's the deal: the IT department is *exceedingly* unlikely to be the source of the "can't forward email" policy. I work for one of the five largest Universities in the States. I can tell you that nothing like that would ever come from the IT department. Ever. It would come from people like a VP or Provost who oversees the admissions and/or fundraising process. Why? They want to be able to conduct all business, from admissions/housing/financial aid when you come in, to begging you to become a contributor when you leave, as cheaply as possible. This means e-mail and it means forcing you to use theirs so that you can't say, "oh, Hotmail must've eaten it!" or "You sent it to the wrong address!" You have one address, and you are responsible for it, period. It comes from way over the IT people's heads, and they may even hate it.

that's not outsourcing

[oohshiny]

Google and Microsoft will advertise if you don't pay them, as well they should. Getting a free service from a company isn't "outsourcing".

Outsourcing means you pay market rates for the service. Then, your students won't be subjected to advertising.

(As an aside, the ads are easy to kill.)

Re:Contact them

[Angostura]

The general rule is that any semi-complicated operation mediated through a GUI will appear complex when described textually, but may well be simple to actually carry out. Meanwhile any command line operation will be simple to write down, but often impossible for a neophyte to discover by themselves.

Re:Sounds complicated

[TeknoHog]

"c'mon, everyone uses windows, what are you a communist?"

It's funny that Americans say 'communism' when they refer to a centrally planned economy in a totalitarian government. Of course, there's nothing centrally planned or totalitarian about everyone using Windows.

Re:Which university?

[arth1]

Not many colleges or universities have particularly low quotas anymore, and exceptionally few bounce mail when you hit such a quota.

Any quota is a particularly low quota. If one is set at all, it's with the expectation that it will be hit -- why else set it?

As for bouncing (or worse), that depends on whether the quota is hard or soft, and whether it is set at system level or application level. If on the latter, yes, a system can still accept e-mail, but if the former, the MTA has no other recourse than to bounce. And even if the former, it's worse than worthless unless the user also has the means to export the emails somewhere else.

As a system administrator, I have no way to know whether the 10 GB a certain person received overnight is all important or not. It could very well be. The worth of the data is their domain, not mine. What I can do is make it easy for them to move the data offsite, and recommend that they do so, and also make alternative methods of transfer available. Other than that, add disk space as necessary, and keep the data available to those with the insight to judge its value - the users. Imposing a limit isn't something I can do effectively, as I can't and shouldn't judge whether cousin Anna's pictures from last year are of more value than the thesis material expected to come in by e-mail tomorrow. By enforcing a quota, I make that choice.

Re:Uh, complain?

[dal20402]

Speaking as one of those "average students"...

1. Webmail, of any sort (including gmail), is annoying to use. No matter how sophisticated your javascript/AJAX tricks are, you can't make a webmail interface as sensible or responsive as that of an ordinary desktop mail client.

2. Most of us have university and non-university accounts. If we use webmail, we either have to forward messages from one account to the other (exactly what the OP is complaining he can't do with his harebrained Windows Live setup), or have to check more than one unresponsive, badly designed webmail site, instead of simply looking at all our messages in one desktop email client.

3. Desktop email clients tend to have much larger feature sets than webmail interfaces.

I was recently affected by my school's switch to "MyMail." In theory, the system supports IMAP, but in practice, the IMAP facility is slow and unreliable. Thankfully, the system does allow us to forward email, so my university email goes to my account at fastmail.fm (who are the world's most kick-ass IMAP provider).

IMAP is also much to be preferred over POP. All of us will have to check email from multiple machines at some point (some poster said something about Mom's house at Christmas...) By handling everything on the server side, IMAP makes it possible to look at the same directory structure on the server and in your desktop email client, or to have desktop email clients set up on multiple machines (i.e. my laptop and my big studio rig).