Re SFU mail lists

[Nilima Nigam <nigam@math.sfu.ca>]

Dear all

       I wrote to Brian Stewart (CIO) and others regarding upcoming changes to policies around SFU mail lists. (We had a discussion here last week about it.) 

I received helpful context from the VPR. In brief, SFU is in a tough spot. His longer message (reproduced here with permission) is below.

Brian is open to meeting affected colleagues, and I encourage you to reach out to his office. 

In the longer run, I personally find myself doing more and more via cloud services - using Dropbox to collaborate, using Github or google  to host websites for scientific events, giving non-SFU emails when submitting papers, etc.

Cheers

Nilima

'Nilima,
  I have discussed this with Brian to get a better understanding. I 
think a bit more context would be helpful:

- The risk: many of our students (or potential future students) have 
gmail as their primary contact address. If email from SFU is blocked by 
gmail, we will effectively lose contact
with those students. It is therefore important that we are not 
blacklisted as an organization.

- This will not affect all institutions in the same way. For example, at 
UofA the underlying email provider is google (cloud-based). Their mail 
lists are google groups. They will not be troubled by a change in 
google's policies because google's services will comply with google's 
rules. In contrast, our mail list system is home-made, very old, and is 
not compliant with the new google rules (e.g., 
https://www.litmus.com/blog/new-yahoo-gmail-email-deliverability-rules). 
There was a plan in motion to gradually replace the current mail list 
functionality at SFU with something newer and better, but not by 
February 1, 2024. (note - traditionally, we did not have the same 
options as universities in other provinces, we built our own platforms 
and ran them in our own data centre to comply with BC's strict privacy 
laws. Since COVID, those rules have loosened and we now do Zoom, Teams, 
etc. using cloud-based services, but not everything we had from "back in 
the day" has been replaced yet).

- As I understand it (Brian can correct me) our options look like:
   1) Just roll the dice and hope we are not blacklisted
   2) Remove external addresses from our mailing lists and ensure we are 
not blacklisted
   3) Retrofit a lot of missing functionality (ie. write and test a 
bunch of new code) in our very old mail list platform in the next two weeks
   4) Look for other solutions (software as a service) that could be 
brought in very quickly to transition existing mail lists to a different 
platform

The consequences of 1) can be pretty heavy for student services, student 
recruitment for fall 2024, etc. It doesn't seem wise. 2) is the 
announced default course. I know they have looked at 3) and found that 
it is impractical - the system is very old and the changes are large. In 
response to community concerns like yours, I know they are also actively 
exploring 4)....but there is no guarantee so far that a solution exists 
that can integrate with our existing systems in short-order (ie. by Feb. 
1).

I know Brian and others are also reaching out to google about potential 
extensions, exemptions, etc. but google need not listen. They have also 
been reaching out to colleagues at  other Canadian institutions but the 
awareness of the issue is low at the moment....there may not be 
well-established strategies yet at our sister institutions that have 
similar vulnerabilities.

It is a bit of a rock and a hard place situation at the moment. Thanks 
for pointing out the impact this will have on how many researchers 
work....it raises the urgency level on option 4) or coming up with an 
option 5) of some kind....'

 Nilima Nigam
Professor
Dept. of Mathematics
Simon Fraser University