On Sun, 20 Jan 2013 18:37:10 -0500, John Slee <[email protected]> wrote:
On 21 January 2013 00:58, Greg R <[email protected]> wrote:
We had a regular flow of forward-to-gmail users wondering how mail from
us
ended up in the google spam bins, and getting told that's the price of
not
using the University mail-systems.
Really? Did you ever stop to wonder _why_ Google might think they were
spam, and that perhaps the root cause might well exist in the university
net?
We knew very well why the Google thought we were sending them spam. The
pre MS-Live student email system forwarded all email before it had been
through the spam filters, so we WERE forwarding a lot of spam. Happily for
us, their lexical checkers are good enough to let through most of the
stuff we wanted through.
Our few Fac/Staff Exchange users who forwarded all mail off campus were
known to our support staff and had largely accepted those losses as the
price of getting an interface they wanted.
After the migration to MS-Live we still had people forwarding mail to
outside sources. Acording to the helpdesk people who were helping people
make this happen, there were two big reasons for WHY people were doing
this:
1. They hated Microsoft and everything it stood for.
2. They wanted all their mail in one inbox, which was somewhere else.
This is all the price of attempting to service a campus of 23,000 people.
There are, guaranteed, to be at least 230 people who catagorically hate
everything we're doing with email and will avoid it at all costs. We
didn't have the money to satisfy everyone.
The limited service guarantee you describe is reasonable, but presumably
there was a reason for those folks using Gmail. An abhorrent uni webmail
interface, for example.
Which is a very large part of the reason that the Associated Students
voted to outsource student email off of (badly funded) Uni-managed systems
and onto a "free" provider. To a lot of our surprise, considering the
reputation of the companies at the time, they elected to go with
Microsoft's service over Google's. This was because MS was able to answer
the question of, "and what, exactly, are you doing with all of this tasty
usage-data we're generating for you" to their satisfaction; Google
handwaved too much.
So in a sense, the students voted to forward ALL student email off campus.
Those of us in central services who had been fighting for adequate
spam-fighting funds to protect student email (20,000 mailboxes requires a
massive amount of money for a paid spam-service, the freeware stuff we'd
been using was univerally viewed as Not Acceptable) cheered. So long as
the FRPA requirements were met (they were) we were happy to let someone
else manage that massive pile.
--
Law of Probable Dispersal:
Whatever it is that hits the fan will not be evenly distributed.
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