Re: Email for Life

[Frances Atkinson <frances@sfu.ca>]

We offered a full function life-time @alumni.sfu.ca email service on our old email system. When we implemented Zimbra, we moved to an email identity forwarding service (still as @alumni.sfu.ca) but not an extension of their Zimbra @sfu.ca identity or access. 

We offered it to about 18,000 existing users of the old full-function service, about half of those totally inactive, and some of the rest only lightly active. We're also offering it to new grads who've been on Zimbra for the last 18 months, about 5,000 of those so far. 

My figures are a bit out of date, but a while ago the total uptake was about 10,000. We've had a few dozen complaints about the loss of the @sfu.ca identity and/or the full-function Zimbra service. This seems a low number of complaints as a proportion of the 23,000 mentioned above. 

The motivations behind the identity forwarding service were to give alumni a prestigious and persistent identity that they could publicize as a stable identity, even as they might change the forwarding destination. We built a self-service signup interface with the ability to return and update the forwarding or password. The identity is held in it's own LDAP and will also work as a login to wireless at any campus. Over time it will likely acquire other abilities, such as some library access.  

We have just opened discussions with the Advancement Office about the idea of giving doners full-function @sfu.ca Zimbra accounts for a minimum annual donation with charitable receipt. The doners could be anybody - i.e. not necessarily alumni. It's too soon to tell whether this discussion will go anywhere.

Frances

-- 
Frances Atkinson
Director
Institutional, Collaborative, and Academic Technologies 
IT Services
Simon Fraser University
www.sfu.ca
778-782-5721
frances@sfu.ca

----- "Rob Thompson" <rob@wayne.edu> wrote:

| Hi,
| 
| Is anybody out there offering, or considering offering an email inbox
| to alumni for life, or for an extended period of time after
| graduation?  If so, any lessons learned, words of advice, etc?
| 
| Thanks,
| -Rob
| 
| --
| Rob Thompson, Systems Analyst
| Enterprise Applications
| Computing & Information Technology
| Wayne State University
| phone: 313-577-5645
| im: ab5602@yahoo.com
| 
| Public Key: http://pgp.wayne.edu/rob.key