Lifetime e-mail for alumni

We’re doing it. Skidmore has about 2,700 students.

We don’t call it “for life” but rather we tell users that they will keep their mailbox as long as we have a contract with Microsoft. If that ends, we don’t know what the next possibility will be so why promise?

It’s working well except users can maintain their passwords at Microsoft, leaving us out of the picture (we no longer sync once they move to alumni.skidmore.edu), but it’s not clear how that’s done at Outlook Live. The requests are so few that I take care of it manually as one of the administrators and it’s little bother.

One of the good things is that they keep their college mail. We use PowerShell to change the domain and no mail is lost. We used to delete their mailbox and then forward for life to a 3^rd party email account. This is much better.

I’m curious to get opinions on for those colleges running e-mail for alumni do you ever run into any extra e-mail phishing or malware problems beyond your regular staff / student e-mail accounts?

I would like to think that if you offload things to Gmail that Google would handle most of that for you but just curious since we are looking at making some changes to our Exchange services in the coming months.

-Aaron

Warner Pacific College

Network Engineer

From: The EDUCAUSE Small College Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:SMALLCOL@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU] On Behalf Of Hall, Rand
Sent: Wednesday, January 09, 2013 7:44 AM
To: SMALLCOL@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
Subject: Re: [SMALLCOL] Lifetime e-mail for alumni

I've created metrics a couple of times in attempts to stop the service. The rate of use is VERY low. Those that use it use it infrequently (and typically only to "just make sure no one sent anything to this address"). This infrequent use has a bad side effect--nearly every use requires a password reset.

The Development office is definitely the driver, users not so much.  One of our Colleges had around 900 accounts until recently.  We could only show about 20-30 of them having been used in the last year. 

Thanks to this data the Development office has since invested in Raiser’s Edge Netcommunity hosted service, and we provide the alumni subdomain as a forwarding address only. Students are informed of Netcommunity of as part of the account deprovisioning process after graduation.

-Shane

_______________________________

Shane Wendel

Chief Systems Engineer

SRPH Building A, Suite 360

College Station, TX 77843

I've created metrics a couple of times in attempts to stop the service. The rate of use is VERY low. Those that use it use it infrequently (and typically only to "just make sure no one sent anything to this address"). This infrequent use has a bad side effect--nearly every use requires a password reset.

Our students get a new address username @ alumni.skidmore.edu but the old username @ skidmore.edu still delivers to their mailbox. Only the former may be used to log in.

There is no need to advise correspondents of the new address. The biggest challenge is getting the alums to begin to login with the new, longer address.

Brien G. Muller

IT Help Desk Manager | Skidmore College

(518) 580-5931

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/SkidmoreITHelp

From: The EDUCAUSE Small College Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:SMALLCOL@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU] On Behalf Of Coehoorn, Joel
Sent: Wednesday, January 09, 2013 1:00 PM
To: SMALLCOL@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
Subject: Re: [SMALLCOL] Lifetime e-mail for alumni

Rand,

Funny you mention Facebook, as a Merrimack ’02 alum, I can distinctly remember checking to see if my MC email was still active when Facebook was introduced!

Thank you all for your input.  The primary driver behind this was requests by students and from the Alumni office.  The project itself has been put on the backburner many times by IT but it continually appears at the top of the wish list of our student community.  Password resets are a big sticking point for us – we currently have controls in place for identity verification when a user request a password reset.  All of that goes out the window once the student graduates.

Interestingly enough however, students actually prefer the subdomain address (alumni.lasell.edu) to their student email (.lasell.edu).   

Mark

______________________________________________

I've created metrics a couple of times in attempts to stop the service. The rate of use is VERY low. Those that use it use it infrequently (and typically only to "just make sure no one sent anything to this address"). This infrequent use has a bad side effect--nearly every use requires a password reset.

I think the operative questions are, "What is the need for lifetime email?" and "Who is driving it?"

I've seen two user-driven reasons for the service. When Facebook was young and required an EDU address we had people begging for addresses. That's no longer an issue. No matter how hard we tried to communicate the issue we've had quite a few people express surprise when their account went away after they graduated. (We have the same problem with employees.) They get caught with a few outstanding resumes with bad contact info.

IMHO, the big driver is a well meaning Alumni office. There are plenty of "community building" companies out there that try to sell portal systems that are supposed to increase engagement and, as a theoretical byproduct, giving. Email for life is part of the equation. It's supposed to add stickiness. "Look! We just sent a million emails to our alumni and only had 0.1% bounce!! Wow, we have an accurate database! I wonder why that email campaign generated so few responses..." 

If you want to get rid of the service just involve your legal counsel and tell them that people are running for-profit businesses and kiddie porn rings under the school's moniker. You think they aren't? 

Rand

Rand P. Hall

Director, Network Services                 askIT!

Merrimack College

978-837-3532

rand.hall@merrimack.edu

If I had an hour to save the world, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute finding solutions. – Einstein