On Tue, 2022-06-21 at 12:34 +0930, Tim via users wrote: > 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? My last job before retiring was running our university network service, which included the corporate email. After several years of tightening budgets and losing support staff (for context, this was in Venezuela) I managed to persuade the university to abandon our central mail server and adopt Google as our provider. Best decision I ever made. The system now works, has great spam control, and virtually no direct support cost aside from our own help desk. Best of all, as a university we got it all for nothing. [Comments on Google's world domination will be disregarded - I've heard them all]. When Microsoft heard we were about to do this, they rushed in with a counter offer. Luckily we kept our heads and have not regretted it. Believe me, the whole bit about "keeping control of our data" is entirely familiar to me. My counter is that you can't control your data if you don't have 24-hour professional support and hardened security. In an academic environment, this is virtually impossible and definitely expensive. Some departments continue to run their own mail servers. We didn't forbid that. We just told them they were on their own. We also didn't attempt to standardise on mail clients, though we offered help desk support for the usual suspects. poc _______________________________________________ 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
