Yostivanich

I’m cur­rently extremely frus­trated with Texas Tech and their email sup­port at the moment. I’ve just con­verted over my email from being redi­rected to my Gmail account where I han­dle every­thing into set­ting up Thun­der­bird to receive the emails here at my apart­ment. Why did I do this in the first place, well it wasn’t by choice. I liked hav­ing all my mail directed to Google, it allowed me to har­ness the power of Gmail arguably the best web-mail ser­vice. TTU has now decided that they would no longer redi­rect email sent to your TTU email account to a dif­fer­ent email addresses. Okay I am not an expert in email deliv­ery sys­tems but the whole announce­ment sounds like snake oil. First off because if I a highly tech­ni­cal per­son can’t really under­stand the rea­sons behind the announce­ment what hope does the aver­age stu­dent have? Sec­ond SPAM has been increas­ing across the board with every­body say­ing spam is increas­ing. The sec­ond argu­ment and the rea­son redi­rects have been turned off is that TTU mail is being regarded as spam, hog­wash is my response. While yes redi­rect­ing mail to an exter­nal account increases the spam rat­ing, that isn’t the only way spam is judged. Also no legit sys­tem uses black­lists any­more. All that a black­list accom­plishes is cre­at­ing a list that becomes larger and larger and thereby inef­fec­tive. But let us say that it isn’t and it’s not like they don’t pro­vide other ways to access your email. How­ever let’s look at the options: Out­look Web Access, Exchange Account, POP and/or IMAP access. So pretty stan­dard options, shouldn’t be too hard to get up and run­ning, so let’s go through out choices.

First up Out­look Web Access, uhh do I need to say any­thing else beyond that? Seri­ously Out­look Web Access has some major prob­lems with it that kill it for me. It is decently fast, not as fast as other ser­vices, but it is cer­tainly faster than Win­dows Live, which is so slow that if I was using that for email I would be delet­ing like crazy rather than try­ing to open up mes­sages. So it’s fast enough, what could be wrong with it you ask. How about the UI looks like it is from the early 1990’s. When did they last update it and if they don’t update the UI what does that mean for the ser­vice, could the dis­con­tinue it at some point. Granted some com­pa­nies have never updated their UI (look­ing at you Google), how­ever it’s a great UI that works. This one doesn’t work and looks hor­ren­dous, the but­tons are clear and need to be redesigned. Also every­thing is done using Javascript which while wasn’t bad back in 2004, it’s now 2008. Some AJAX please, just about every other web based email ser­vice has it includ­ing Win­dows Live. What hap­pened to all those UI design­ers and Web Pro­gram­mers design­ing Win­dows Live did they quit for Google or some­thing? Also the text in Out­look Web Access is dis­played using the default text in your browser, Joel Sposky has an awe­some arti­cle as to why this is a prob­lem that I won’t repeat.  Click on Help and what do you get a Help sys­tem that if pos­si­ble looks even worse. Oh and click and see what the require­ments are to use Out­look Web Access and you get that it only works on Inter­net Explorer or Netscape Nav­i­ga­tor. Inner Mono­logue of Out­look Web Access Pro­gram­mer: Oh is Netscape dead? We’ll fix that in a cou­ple of years. But wait I am using the Out­look Web Access with Fire­fox 3.0 Beta 2 release, so why does it work. Oh minor details who even reads those Help arti­cles anymore.

Next up for my skew­er­ing, using an Exchange account. First off this requires a VPN con­nec­tion to TTU and either using Microsoft Out­look or Entourage or Mac Mail. You can also use Pine, but wait Pine was dis­con­tin­ued in 2006 and it was only a text based email so for­get about all those images that TechAn­nounce and tons of other images that inner-system email includes. The VPN is the main prob­lem with Exchange beyond the inher­ent prob­lems asso­ci­ated with both plat­form and soft­ware issues. Also an Exchange account isn’t use­ful for the major­ity of stu­dents who by the way are the one’s redi­rect­ing email, as men­tioned in the announce­ment. The major­ity of stu­dents until in a busi­ness where Exchange is used will just go “Huh” to Exchange and have no clue as to why it is used so heav­ily and the ben­e­fits gained therein. Exchange does allow for easy inte­gra­tion with Outlook’s cal­en­dar, con­tacts, and email sys­tems, also if you have a Win­dows Mobile device it allows for all of that data to be synced across all of those devices. How­ever again student’s aren’t using this and won’t see any ben­e­fit to using Exchange. The VPN con­nec­tion into Tech is the real killer for me. When you VPN into Tech, you are on your inter­net con­nec­tion, how­ever that con­nec­tion is securely con­nected to Tech’s servers so it is almost like you are on cam­pus, expect you don’t have that nice con­nec­tion to the inter­net. Expect you also get Tech’s fil­ter­ing along with it. So not Bit­torent, and every­thing you do online is mon­i­tored and recorded by Tech’s IT ser­vices. Yes, I said every­thing, I know for a fact that Tech records every IM con­ver­sa­tion, every web­site vis­ited, every con­nec­tion you make while on their con­nec­tion. When you are logged in via the VPN this makes it even worse, because at least if a con­nec­tion occurs on your com­puter at the dorm room you can blame it on some­one else who has access to your com­puter and room. With the VPN con­nec­tion you log in with your E-Raider user­name and pass­word, so Tech can be slightly more con­fi­dent who you are. Okay stan­dard argu­ment here about if you aren’t doing noth­ing wrong then you have noth­ing to worry about. Which is so false it doesn’t bear argu­ing any­more. If I am hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with a fel­low over 21 stu­dent dis­cussing a party we are going to go to, is Tech going to come and break up the party even if it doesn’t have any under age drinkers? What about if I am dis­cussing how the admin­is­tra­tion is wrong on an issue. I want the free­dom of speech to be able dis­cuss issues that the admin­is­tra­tion may not wish to be dis­cussed. Does that mean that any­thing that I do is going to be looked at a lit­tle bit closer. Will I be treated dif­fer­ently than other stu­dents? What if I have an unusual name that sticks out in people’s mind, will my data be exam­ined at all by the IT staff? These sort of what if state­ments could go on for ages and all of them are very real pos­si­bil­i­ties and will prob­a­bly never be dis­cov­ered if any of that occurred because we would never find out about it as they all have high deny abil­ity by the par­ties involved. The biggest thing is that I haven’t signed any sort of agree­ment with Tech allow­ing them access to my data about what web­sites I visit. As a stu­dent liv­ing on-campus you do so and being an employee of Tech you also do, how­ever as sim­ply an off-campus stu­dent no where in either the VPN instruc­tions nor the FAQ are you informed of this. This is a major pri­vacy issue that needs to be dealt with. Also no Bit­Torent, while yes the major­ity of Bit­Torent is ille­gal data being trans­fered and it makes sense for Tech to keep that off of their sys­tem, what hap­pens when you try to use it for legit­i­mate uses. Because a device that can be used for wrong and become pop­u­lar for ille­git­i­mate uses is does that mean that it should be auto­mat­i­cally out­lawed? The answer of course is no. I do use Bit­Torent for legit­i­mate uses on a close to a daily basis, so what are the other options for me. There are mul­ti­ple other exam­ples of fil­ter­ing that occurs on Tech’s net­work, this is sim­ply the most obvi­ous and the one most stu­dents are famil­iar with.

Two left, POP and IMAP, which are very sim­i­lar. POP and IMAP allow you to access your email through any desk­top email client. POP how­ever is only a one-way sync, you down­load mes­sages to your desk­top how­ever any changes made stay on the desk­top and are not reflected on the server where the mes­sages are stored. This means that deleted items and mes­sages placed into a folder acu­tally still remain in the inbox. IMAP is a highly supe­rior option which is a two way sync whereby changes made on the desk­top are reflected in the inbox. So you can add fold­ers, delete, mark as junk mail and not have to repeat your work through either an Exchange account or through the Web Access. Which is all really good and what I cur­rently have set up. Ahh but what about send­ing a mes­sage from your TTU mail­box? Once again you have to have a VPN con­nec­tion to TTU to send mes­sages. Are you kid­ding me, so what good is IMAP or POP access if I still need a VPN con­nec­tion to reply to peo­ple, I might as well use Exchange.

Stu­dents will prob­a­bly wind up using the Out­look Web Access since it is the eas­i­est to setup, read none. How­ever I am sure I will begin to hear stu­dents upset at this change as they now have to check both their per­sonal email account and their Tech account, and the hor­ri­ble UI they will be forced to use. Texas Tech do some­thing, say let me send mes­sages with­out hav­ing to VPN in, or get Microsoft to update Out­look Web Access or put those redi­rects back in place.

Also I know that Tech hasn’t made it very clear that mail redi­rects will be turned off as many stu­dents who I know do redi­rect their TTU mail when asked by myself have not done so. Also they have no clue about the redi­rect even being turned off. This is going to be inter­est­ing in the IT sup­port call cen­ter for the next week or so. Espe­cially as this is occur­ring right before classes start and stu­dents will be look­ing for those class wide emails from professors.

Dis­claimer: I am cur­rently both a stu­dent and employee of Texas Tech Uni­ver­sity, this post is my own thoughts and not the thoughts of Texas Tech, also they were not informed before hand of the nature of this or any of the blog posts.