Comments on: Email Part Deux-Or Revisiting the Prior Post

By: Artemis

Artemis — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 09:37:22 +0000

To follow up on Dude’s comment, I find it’s extremely useful to have student emails and listservs at the ready before I even meet them for the first time. I get tons of administrative emails, too, like from the Health Center or from the police telling me about stolen bikes and attempted assaults and whatnot. I suppose an alternative would be to require students to register their private emails with the university when they enroll, but that seems wrong somehow. Do I really need to know their ISP? Additionally, I’m thinking I like the idea that they have online personas, and probably more than one. One hopes that the students use a different tone when they send emails from their edu account.

And lastly, what do you think the effects are now that my university’s email is provided by gmail?

By: Dude the Obscure

Dude the Obscure — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 03:34:08 +0000

One advantage of the university’s giving students email accounts — and assigning their usernames using an algorithm based on real names rather than letting them choose their own — is that I will not be put into the uncomfortable position of having to respond to a student whose personal off-campus email address is something like “8meatyinches@dotcum.com” or “nukemexico@nativistnazis.com”. To avoid this, in my syllabus I always say that I will not respond to any student email messages from any address other than their official university account. Am I evil? Perhaps. But at least I’m not going to wind up in the newspaper as the instructor who carried on a correspondence at taxpayers’ expense with a student whom he “called” (in an email address) “hotlipsbabe”.

By: Casey

Casey — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 17:23:52 +0000

I completely agree. The three universities that I have attended have all wasted significant financial and institutional reasources trying to mantain and update their email systems. My current University is advertising their upcoming update as “blowing Gmail out of the water!” If an email address was required but not provided, IT departments would have remarkable amount of resources to educate students about how to use free services, a novel thought for an educational institution.

By: Katie

Katie — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 01:15:43 +0000

I like the idea..except when it comes to keeping track of my 200 students email addresses. The new system would require reconfiguration of large databases on campus, to include the email address. The netid that the students have is also their email address — so it comes on my class roster. It is doable…just more would have to change than just allowing them to enter a contact email.

By: atw

atw — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 12:27:02 +0000

Campus services usernames/email addresses might serve as an authentication method. Don’t many campuses use databases that serve multiple functions in the quest for single-sign on or, at the least, synchronized usernames and passwords? Email, network services, webspace, LMS access, SIS access, etc. are often bundled together.

By: Trevor

Trevor — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 03:07:03 +0000

There is one other “but” that I haven’t seen in this post: Separate email accounts keep your email separate! Think about snailmail. We have different physical mailboxes for home and office. Imagine if the post office suddenly started putting your home utility bills and letters from grandma into your university drop box. Most people want to keep those things separate. With a single email account (me@hotmail.com or whatever), it’s impossible to separate the two domains, not even with a rule filter. But if the university provides you an .edu email account, keeping your work email separate from your personal email is easy and automatic.

By: Elliott

Elliott — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 02:52:45 +0000

Spot on Post. I have two campus email accounts that the colleges I attend won’t let me forward or download. Remembering to check these accounts is a royal pain, and the emails usually sit in the inbox for days before being read.

Another problem is I don’t have my address book up on their servers, which makes using the account very difficult. I have to manually look-up and enter any email address I need, that annoys me.

As far a security goes, teach your students to use PGP in their emails. As long as the institutions exchange public keys with the students, authentication and privacy aren’t a problem. With many plug-ins freely available for most email clients (even gmail via Firefox), PGP isn’t very hard to use at all. Besides, PGP is much more secure than any campus email account will be. Even large free email providers such as Google have far more robust and secure systems than colleges do.

By: Pete Jones

Pete Jones — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 00:53:59 +0000

I definitely agree with many of your comments regarding separate email mailboxes for students. These are going the way of the dinosaur. And good riddance. Gmail is so superior to any other email service I’ve ever used, it’s stunning.

However, I do think .edu forwarding addresses are of use for students and especially faculty. In certain ways, this provides the same effect as stationary in the analog era. Any person can send a letter, but if it’s on stationary from an important institution, it gets the readers full attention. Likewise, in email boxes the reader initially has only the subject and email address to judge an email’s content. If you’re getting emails from john.smith@gmail, barry@hotmail, Tom@yahoo, it’s difficult to make this initial sort of what’s official, read now business and what’s from an email list to which you belong.

By: simon k?ne

simon k?ne — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 21:48:23 +0000

i agree that universities may not need to supply an email MAILBOX (a place to store email). as someone who must maintain and use student contact information, i support the continued distribution of an email ADDRESS which must be configured to store/forward email to an outside MAILBOX. the distinction of mailbox and address is not well understood by the vast majority of email users.

i support email addresses distribution because i know for a fact that i can send an email to a student (or staff or faculty) by simply using their university provided identifier (i.e. at ut dallas it?s called the ?netid?). the university uses that identifier in many records and databases since it is a short, unique, and simply key to use (i am aware that it is technically not a database key). having to relate a netid to a students current email address in some database is simply not efficient in many cases.

information resources at ut dallas has discussed the possibility of out sourcing student email accounts to an email service provider, like google, hotmail, yahoo, etc. for sometime. i wonder if it will ever happen…