OT: redirection, a bad idea???

[Scott Silva]

on 9/25/2007 12:42 PM Denis Beauchemin spake the following:
> Julian Field a écrit :
>>
>>
>> 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
>>
> Julian,
> 
> The site www.zepler.net is quite interesting!  I will make sure all 
> people that will work on our email forwarding service look at it. It is 
> really similar to what we want to do.
> Using a different domain name is also a good thing because all students 
> and staff now share the same @usherbrooke.ca domain, creating more and 
> more address conflicts over time: people use 
> firstname.lastname at usherbrooke.ca as their email address; if a conflict 
> arises, the newer person will have the choice of adding a number or 
> middle initial to his email address but this is not really satisfying, 
> IMO.  By removing grad students' email address from the USherbrooke.ca 
> domain, this problem will not get worse every year... but I just 
> realized it will now move to the new domain name instead...  oh well...
> 
> Denis
> 
It looks like it has another benefit. If the site does get blacklisted, the 
main mail servers will still be free to function.

-- 

MailScanner is like deodorant...
You hope everybody uses it, and
you notice quickly if they don't!!!!