OT: redirection, a bad idea???

[Julian Field]

Denis Beauchemin wrote:
> 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...
Our usernames issued to students include the year they first registered, 
so this problem doesn't get worse with time, they don't re-use usernames 
as they don't need to.  We went for a separate domain for various 
reasons, one of which was to make it obvious they weren't able to send 
mail pretending to be someone still working for us.

We handle all the email forwarding with nothing more than a cron job 
using a database which generates a virtusertable in sendmail. Nice and 
simple. It's all handled by my main dept MX servers and mail system, so 
there isn't any separate mail system to be administered for zepler.net 
in addition to the main one.

So it doesn't add any extra maintenance work at all, other than 1 table 
on our database server, and a script and a cron entry on each of the MX 
servers. And they get all the same anti-spam and anti-virus tools they 
are used to getting when they had a "real" work account when they 
worked/studied here.

Jules

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