OT: redirection, a bad idea???

[Julian Field]

Denis Beauchemin wrote:
> Jeff A. Earickson a écrit :
>> On Tue, 25 Sep 2007, Denis Beauchemin wrote:
>>
>>> Hello all,
>>>
>>> The PHB are talking about redirecting grad students' local email 
>>> accounts to some other external account they read more frequently. 
>>> All students get a @USherbrooke.ca email address in their first 
>>> year.  PHB would like to continue sending emails to grad students at 
>>> their @USherbrooke.ca email address after they left but instead of 
>>> being stored on our servers, it would be redirected (probably 
>>> through a LDAP lookup) to some external email address they would 
>>> provide us.
>>>
>>> If implemented, will our servers risk getting blacklisted by 
>>> others?  If so, how could I still redirect the emails without too 
>>> much trouble?
>>>
>>
>> Denis,
>>
>> Do you mean redirect or forward?  To me, a redirect means "bounce the
>> email back to the sender with new address information, eg
>> User has moved, please try <new address>".  A forward is a (silent)
>> retransmit of email to another address, which may or may not work.
>>
>> Our policy is:
>>
>> 1) We will only redirect (for six months) emails for graduates and 
>> terminated employees.  We will NOT forward if you are gone for good.
>> We want to advertise your new address for you.
>>
>> 2) We will only forward on a temporary basis if you are off-campus
>> but otherwise still a student or faculty, eg semester abroad.  We
>> will NOT forward if you are on-campus, period.  We don't care how
>> much you like Gmail.  In general, I discourage off-campus forwards.
>>
>> Forwarding for indefinite periods of time is a bad idea, IMHO.
>>
>> Jeff Earickson
>> Colby College
> Jeff,
>
> You are right... what we are planning to do is a forward, not a 
> redirect!  Sorry for the confusion.
>
> We do not allow forwarding for active students/staff but are planning 
> on implementing it for graduate students.
>
> All outbound email is scanned for virus/spam.
>
> Should I be worried?
We run a old-university-username at zepler.net alumni mail forwarding 
service for all our ex-students and ex-staff. We scan everything on its 
way in and on its way out, and we don't have any problems at all. They 
have web access to a page that lets them change their forwarding 
address, and to change their password. The password is started from 
their old-university-username password as it was when they left us.
It all works very nicely.

But we allow forwarding for all our current students and staff too. If 
they prefer to use gmail, then we let them. Overseas students may have 
very valid reasons for not accessing our email service while they are 
away from Southampton. Some countries (and companies) in the world 
restrict external (ie out-of-country or out-of-company) access to 
various services. It's up to them to ensure they get all their work 
mail, so we encourage those students to forward it *and* deliver it 
locally to their work account. Failure to receive an email is not 
considered a valid excuse for late delivery of coursework, unless many 
such complaints have been received about the same missing message from 
different people. That would be sufficient evidence to prove the problem 
was indeed at our end, if a lot of people didn't get the message.

The answer doesn't always have to be "no, you can't do it", certainly 
not in a world-leading educational environment :-)

Jules

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