Re: Discontinuing student email service

[Matthew Gracie <graciem () CANISIUS EDU>]

Hall, Rand wrote:
> On the heels of another student email outsourcing question...it has
> occurred to me that some of us may want to step back and reflect on
> the following question:
>
> Why do we still provide student email accounts?
>
> We once provided labs full of typewriters and then computers. We used
> to provide our own dialup service. Once these things were
> commoditized we were able to largely eliminate them. Do student email
> accounts fall into the same lifecycle pattern?

I can't speak for anyone else, but here at Canisius, the
college-provided email address is an official point of contact for
departments like the library, the registrar's office, and the bursar's
office. It's used in our CMS, our class-specific email lists, and a
dozen other places.

Getting rid of it would mean either lots more postal mail or coming up
with some backend database of student's voluntarily provided home email
addresses. I shudder at the thought of maintaining that mess.

--Matt

--
Matt Gracie                         (716) 888-8378
Information Security Administrator  graciem () canisius edu
Canisius College ITS                Buffalo, NY
http://www2.canisius.edu/~graciem/graciem_public_key.gpg