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?"

No POP service?

[HomelessInLaJolla]

One could write a shell script to negotiate the HTTP transactions with wget and pipe the resulting pages through a series of filters to strip away the page cruft (ads, navbars, menus, etc.) and the HTML tags and leave only the message text which could be inserted into standard system /var/mail files. After the shell script was sufficiently defined one could use the source code of wget, the source code of HTML libs, the source code of a mail daemon, and a little innovative C glue and write a formal local Windows Live Mail retrieval tool. Once the custom tool achieves any sort of popularity, though, then MS will begin to change the page formats subtly to confound the stripping filters. Then it'll be another radar race.

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

So basically they don't provide e-mail

[iamacat]

Just open a gmail account, forward e-mail from Windows Live and use the free POP.

Sounds Dubious

[moehoward]

I am skeptical of your question/issue. I strongly suggest that you post a link to your institution's new policy. Or, post the policy here yourself. Your description is so "worst-case-scenario", that I have too many doubts. University's are not completely stupid and you have framed this as a "dumb-big-institution" gripe. I mean, your question is framed so that there is no possible answer. It seems to be a setup for a bunch of anti-MS posts and "what's-a-poor-student-to-do" grandstanding.

Also, if what you say is true then you can always get a free (as in beer) bot that will provide any auto-forward capabilities that Windows Live may not (or may) provide.

Does Google support IMAP yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

My University [dailynorthwestern.com] is switching to Google. One of my concerns is that I really like my desktop clients (alpine and thunderbird) and prefer IMAP. While gmail is an excellent web-client, I don't really use my gmail account that much, because it doesn't offer IMAP & POP is both "flaky" and limiting.

Does google's hosted service offer IMAP? Or are there plans to in the near future?

Re:My experience as a student and campus IT admin.

[Anonymous Coward]

The disadvantage of having official registered student e-mail addresses among many different domains/providers is that you have really no assurance that each message will get to the right person. Yes, you can verify that an official campus message left whatever server it's hosted on, but you can't verify that someone at another provider ever actually had the message delivered to their account.

I don't understand the problem with having a universal campus-hosed e-mail service. They have servers accessible to the outside world, so why not throw in an e-mail server? If you make it simple (ie: SquirrelMail seems to be a popular campus e-mail hosting app, probably cause of it's cost and simplicity), I wouldn't think size would be an issue, as long as you set the proper quotas per e-mail/user.

Having e-mail server admin duties has shown me many times more issues, concerning mail from provider to provider, can arise than I ever knew. Heck, I've seen e-mail message >100k be thrown back and have our domain blacklisted from their servers because it was considered "spam with an attachment." IIRC, the message was a summary of a recent event we hosted and the attachment was a photo of the guest we had.

State university; needs of professors

[davidwr]

If it is a state-run university you may be able to slow the process down by using public pressure or lobbying. Write your state lawmakers. Cite issues like "unfairly giving one company the upper hand at the expense of others" and "forcing students to view ads as a course requirement" etc. If you are lucky, you may find their actions violate state law, although I doubt that's the case.

Talk to professors. Some of them may be running projects which require that certain information never leave the school campus except over secure channels. Or they simply might not want to send certain information anywhere within 1000 miles of Redmond. Find out who they are and have them lobby to change the requirement.

Also find professors and students who are anti-monopoly and anti-forced-advertisements. There should be plenty of them in the School of Liberal Arts. Get them to lobby also.

Given that the decision has already been made, it's probably too late for you. I hope these suggestions help others whose schools are considering outsourcing functions to unrelated entities.

When it comes to educational IT outsourcing of just about anything other than consumer software, I recommend:

• Have a contingency plan if the outsourcing arrangement doesn't work out or the outsourcing partner quits or folds
  
• Buy a white-label solution, with the University's brand on it and no paid advertising unless each ad is university-approved, and no paid ads in IT environments students or employees are required to use. Instead of "GMail," it's "MyUMail."
  
• In ad-free areas, only a discreet mention of who the vendor actually is
  
• All university data is segregated from the vendor's other customer's data
  
• All sensitive data is encrypted to/from the campus or to/from the campus-affiliated person's computer
  
• Only certain vendor employees are allowed access to the data, and then only as needed to do their jobs
  
• Take extra precautions with information related to identity, grades, payroll, class schedule, and other potentially sensitive information. If email and file-storage is outsourced, be aware that employees and students may put others' sensitive information on that space as part of their jobs or classwork. This data needs to be protected as it would be if the data and its backups were controlled by the University.
  

Vendor-neutrality

[frisket]

Any institution which forces users to buy one specific platform just in order to read mail has its head so far up its ass that it might just as well climb up in after it and disappear.

Even in my own institution, which is slavishly Microsoft-dominated, both student email and faculty/staff email are accessible from any platform. Not necessarily optimally -- OWA is probably the suckiest email interface ever devised -- but no-one is placed in the position of not being able to read college email just because they happen to use a Mac, or a Sun, or a Linux box.

It's an education/training problem: most Windows users are only very dimly aware that anything else exists: they may have heard of Apple Macs but probably not of Linux. They've certainly never seen or used anything except Windows, and are thus completely baffled and uncomprehending at the concept of someone who is not a Windows user.

When that species of ignorance exists at decision-making level, you will get people making unwise decisions because they are simply unaware that any problem exists. If they are already that badly brainwashed, then recommendations for alternative action from lower down the food chain will have no effect, because they lack the cognitive hooks on which further information can hang.

Re:Here's a suggestion

[MilesNaismith]

I let a guy like you, follow me around for a day, that changed his mind. From new services that maybe YOU don't see but some other department does, to visible ones like Podcast servers, to just generally maintaining and updating the mountain of existing services, it can be quite a job in a DataCenter. You have 70,000 customers, all of them want better security, none of them want you to change ANYTHING about how they do their job because by God they've been using Telnet and FTP for 20 years.... Nobody will let you work on anything during the day so you have to schedule maintenance cycles during nights and weekends. You can't just "try something out", an extensive test procedure has to be followed for everything. Documentation must be maintained. Cross-training coworkers. At the end of the day I offered to let him answer my pager which goes over 3 or 4 times every night for something, he declined. Walk a mile in another man's shoes first.

Re:yes and no

[Sorthum]

I do work as a mail admin for a university.

Our boss dismissed the idea of outsourcing to Google or anybody else based SOLELY upon the fact that they reserved the right to advertise in the future to our students. We don't view our students as a commodity to be sold, so that kinda killed the whole "outsource the email" idea.

Re:Uh, complain?

[WingedEarth]

Actually, we should hold ourselves to idealistic standards, but shouldn't run away from our problems. Fight the University! Confront the administration and campaign to make the University a better place. What a world we'd have if people actually demonstrated this sort of loyalty to their communities, rather than just moving somewhere that already suited them.