The Impending End of Traditional .forward-style Forwarding

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The Impending End of Traditional .forward-style Forwarding

12/1/2004

By Joe St Sauver

-- Students, coming to school with familiar accounts on Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, whatever, provide those accounts to universities as an initial contact point during the application process.

-- Upon admission, from the student's point of view, nothing has really changed--they want to continue using their familiar account on that third party provider, for any of a variety of reasons. Let's assume that they're allowed to do so, and that address g'es into the institutional ERP student database as the e-mail point of contact.

-- The university decides to unilaterally begin generating a bunch of mail to the student, mail which may be highly germane to the student's program or status, but which the student may not be interested in (regardless of the objective facts).

-- The student pushes the "this is spam" button at the free provider when reading the mail which he or she has received from the university.

-- The university mail sender gets a spam report from the free provider (or maybe they don't, in the end, it really d'esn't matter in this scenario).

-- The university may ignore the report(s) (if they get them), or the sender may remove the recipient (sometimes they can't even ID who to remove, due to anonymization of the complaints), or the sender may contact the student who pushed the "this is spam" button to talk about the issue (but this d'esn't scale so well at big schools).

-- Regardless of whether reports generate removals or not, the fact that at least some users of the free Web e-mail services don't like the university's mail is Locally Noted. (This may be noted as a result of the reports and removals, or it may be a result of the institution being rate limited or blocked outright in more extreme cases).

-- The institution decrees that all mailings must henceforth go *only* to institutionally provided student e-mail addresses.

-- In some cases, forwarding of those accounts is allowed.

-- When forwarding is allowed, nothing's really changed for the better: students still get unwanted institutional mailings, and students still complain, which still "counts against" the institution's reputation with the free Web e-mail provider. Moreover, now, other mail (including presumably at least some spam), *also* gets forwarded, making the institutional reputation worse yet. In the truly degenerate case, institutional mail gets blocked by the free Web e-mail provider as a result of the forwarding. The institution says, "Shrug, I sent it to the institutionally provided account." Students say, "HEY, you never told me that my car was being towed for unpaid tickets" (or whatever), because their forwarded mail was blocked.

-- When forwarding is not allowed, the students may set up their free Web e-mail account to suck e-mail from the institutional account to the free account via POP consolidation. Doing so typically requires storage of institutional account credentials on the free Web e-mail provider's system. Now *there's* a big help, security-wise... Alternatively, in the forwarding-not-allowed case, the student continues to use their preferred account, largely ignoring the institutional account, and again, communication fails to occur.