Hi George, > Since the late 1980s when I set up our department Research Computing > Facility, my department has managed its own email servers. We now > have extremely competent staff (not me!) who do great work dealing > with spam, phishing, etc., and I get much less spam on my math > department account than I do on, say, my account in the CS > department, which uses a commercial spam blocking service. But > recently the pressure from University IT to let them run all mail has > increased to the point where we're basically being forced to shut > down our own mail servers and use theirs, effective around the end of > this month. The rebel in me prompts me to ask: Empire building by the IT department? How do you think they'd feel about lots of complaint reports about increased spam and horrid software? Surely enough official complaints would require them to adequately respond? I remember seeing the student and email interface when my sister was studying to be a teacher. Jeez it was awful, worse than any webmail service I'd ever seen, terrible to use and so removed from what email can do. Not to mention that "working" was a sporadic condition, and being forced to do all your work submissions through it just makes a lot of grief for students. One of the driving forces for these in-house email management is often touted as being security, keeping data inside safe. But *actual* good security never seems to be a part of these in-house solutions. I've used Evolution directly with gmail for a few years, now. Gmail's double-confirmation that it's you works through Evolution (a little browser window pops up, inside Evolution, when its needed). Though that's with Gmail on the WWW, I've never tested it with an in-house Gmail suite. I use fetchmail for everything else, into my own Dovecot mail server (and Evolution to access that). I've never figured out how to get Gmail through fetchmail, but then I don't really use Gmail myself, so I've let it slide. I send and read mail using other accounts, Gmail is used for those Android apps that require registration. I don't care for Gmail's web interface, either. "Chaotic disaster," would be my description. It was an awful lot of faffing about through settings splattered all over the place, going round in circles, to find and switch off bad features. I'd rather have a minimally featured service than one full of stupid things. Looking through your thread, I think you're going to be hamstrung by policy decisions, that they want mail *kept* on their server, even more so than technical "how do I?" issues. But on such policies: What about teachers taking laptops home, and their laptop caching mail on an easily stolen device? Likewise with phones and tablet. Or accessing mail on their easily hackable Windows desktop? Surely dragging mail into your lab's server, or one on your own computer, is exactly the same thing as your email client storing mail locally? These policies always seem like kneejerk reactions to me, when you realise how flawed their blinkered approach is in reality. -- uname -rsvp Linux 3.10.0-1160.66.1.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP Wed May 18 16:02:34 UTC 2022 x86_64 Boilerplate: All unexpected mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted. I will only get to see the messages that are posted to the mailing list. _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Do not reply to spam on the list, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure
