Moving Email to IST

This post was published in the February 2nd Iron Warrior.

The Faculty of Engineering is getting out of the Email business.  Student Email is moving to IST’s Mailserivces during reading week while faculty and staff are moving to IST’s Connect over the coming months.  Students who use MyWaterloo.ca and let the system auto-select the Email server will be redirected when the accounts move to Mailservices.  Your @engmail address will be valid for quite a long time, we will forward Email to the new addresses.  Your preferred new Email address will be userid.@uwaterloo.ca

How things change.  During the entire month of October1988, Engineering Computing processed approximately 1,000 messages to our undergraduate network from the Internet.  Within two years, we were processing 1,000 messages per day and deploying new systems to keep up.  Metcalfe's law states that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system.  Our Email growth reflected the rising connectedness of the world.

The first mass Internet spam was in 1994.  Spam quickly became a parasite on servers, and attachments added load, forcing us to upgrade to ever more powerful servers every few years.  Now it is pretty common for 1,000 message to blast to our Email systems per minute (or more if they could), and the vast majority of it is spam, much of which is discarded before you see it.  Not only are the spam rates climbing, the spammers are getting more sophisticated and harder to detect.

Today our Engineering users communicate with people worldwide and they themselves are offsite – 65% forward Email to Gmail alone.  This makes sense; Gmail does a better job than we can ever do on campus.  They offer more storage, a better user interface, better spam handling, Email for life, etc.  The days when UW could compete on Email are long over.

For the last few years, Engmail used an open source package called SpamAssassin to try to classify spam using a variety of techniques. It does not catch all spam (I’m sure you noticed this), and it has false positives which may cause some valid Email to be treated as spam.  IST also uses SpamAssassin for Mailservices and Connect.

For added measure, IST use gray listing, which uses a system of delays to try to weed out spam.  Under gray listing, a good percentage of off-campus-originated Email is delivered hours later than it was sent.  Under testing Engineering Computing staff found these delays rendered Email effectively useless.  Worse, several important Emails never made it through.

IST’s gray listing is already turned on as part of the transition.  You can turn off gray listing for your Email account at  http://mailservices.uwaterloo.ca/greylisting-toggle.php

Many are questioning why UW is still offering Email locally.  Google does a far better job, it’s also a lot cheaper and the money saved would be better spent on other endeavors.  IST’s mail clusters consist of more than 20 server class computers; it’s expensive and history suggests it will need constant staffing as well as frequent upgrades and overhauls.

Youth today are relatively unimpressed with Email; they favour other technologies for most of their communications. There are essentially two reasons why people feel students need UW-related accounts (though they could be hosted offsite).  Students need a way to communicate with faculty that is secure and uniquely identifies them (UWuserid) – but Email is still an insecure protocol, anyone can impersonate anyone else - a closed messaging system on Ace would be better.  The other factor is that students prefer to correspond with employers and potential employers with a UW branded address.

Google Apps for education would offer Email for life, calendaring, 7GB of storage, word processing, spreadsheets, sophisticated sharing, all with no ads and excellent privacy. It’s already used by thousands of universities.  Microsoft’s Live@Edu competes with a similar array of features and followers.  

However, there is an impediment to transferring student (and faculty and staff) Email to Google or Microsoft – neither company will guarantee that the data will stay in Canada and be subject to Canada’s and Ontario’s privacy laws.  Most likely it would be hosted in the United States and be accessible under the Patriot act.  WLU got around this problem by suggesting Gmail accounts (with WLU branding), but offering optional WLU locally-hosted Email accounts for anyone who preferred the local account.  100% of the students took the Gmail option.