In the 90s campus to me was like a small city that was self-sufficient in a lot of ways. The school provided its own services in-house. A prof also told me he would teach us what industry is doing wrong so we can correct it – that academia was ahead of industry. The school chose the best tools and languages for teaching, not following whatever industry was using.
These concepts seem to be getting lost. These are some universities who have lost the capability of administrating their own email service:
- mit.edu → mit-edu.mail.protection.outlook.com
- unm.edu → unm-edu.mail.protection.outlook.com
- ucsc.edu → aspmx.l.google.com
- ucsb.edu → aspmx.l.google.com
- cmu.edu → aspmx.l.google.com
- princeton.edu → princeton-edu.mail.protection.outlook.com
I have to say it’s a bit embarrassing that these schools have made themselves dependent on surveillance capitalists for something as simple as email. It’s an educational opportunity lost. Students should be maintaining servers.
These lazy schools have inadvertently introduced exclusivity. That is, if a student is unwilling to pawn themselves to privacy-abusing corps who help oil¹ companies find oil to dig for, they are excluded from the above schools if required to have the school’s email account.
Schools pay for MATlab licenses because that’s what’s used in industry. But how is that good for teaching? It’s closed-source, so students are blocked from looking at the code. It contradicts education both because the cost continuously eats away budget and also the protectionist non-disclosure. A school that leads rather than follows would use GNU Octave.
Have any universities rejected outsourcing, needless non-free software, and made independence part of the purpose?
- Google and Microsoft both use AI to help oil companies decide where to drill.
It’s appification. People want an app. And easy. Things like imap, smtp, pop, certificates etc are hard, too hard for most.
And email, done right (safe, no spam, secure, private) is one of the hardest things to do. It’s not easy.
And because it’s not easy you see everybody moving to cloud for email.
Do you have a point? Oh yes. But can you, do you want to explain setting up thunderbird to the median college goer? Can you do that 50 times a day? (yes, click imap, no change the port to the secure one, what a port is? Dont worry, just change the number, oh you typed imapp.Server.edu, no that should be imap, one p. No, not b: p. Yes. No. Sigh, just come over I’ll type it in. FFS.
That’s why the cloud email services are everywhere. Email and users just dont mix well.
What you are describing is a failure of education. Maybe not at the university level, but somewhere. When I taught at an adult vocational school in the 1990s, every course started with the same material: how to use a keyboard and mouse, how to use the operating system, how to navigate and use network resources, and how to use foundational software like word processors, spreadsheets , and data entry systems. And how to set up email clients.
We ran our own email server out of the networking class. Yes, it could be a bit flaky, but that just exercised their backup and recovery skills and kept all the email users on their toes. :)
Hosting email is trivially easy. The only reason not to do it is because all of your sent mail will end up in spam folders if the recipient uses google.
It should be easy when ~95% of the traffic is internal, which is the important traffic. Students and profs emailing each other. How often does a school need to collaborate with another? Google has ruined email and if mail to externals is unreliable that’s fine. Hopefully students are not becoming helpless when the need comes to write a snail mail letter.
I would rather not condition students to satisfy corporate hoops imposed on them by surveillance advertisers.
Thunderbird is a convenience. Every student should have access to a UNIX or linux lab where they can type “pine” at a shell prompt and get a preconfigured mail client. If they want the extra convenience of using a 3rd party client, just give them the raw generic parameters. They are students – it’s their job to struggle through puzzles.