1. SMTP is not a real-time protocol. There is absolutely no guarantee of delivery and most applications that send e-mail are not aware of bounces.
2. Spam is a problem. Everywhere. The tools put in place to battle spam will inevitably treat one of your messages as spam.
3. E-mail overload is an even bigger problem, even if you “solve” the spam problem you are often just tossing more needles in the ever-growing haystack that is the INBOX.

These are issues we see time and time again when some kind of workflow or notification scheme needs to be put into place. What are the alternatives? The easiest is probably RSS, but that assumes that the users are already using some form of RSS reader. Luckily mail programs are starting to incorporate syndication formats and present them to people with the e-mail interface they know and love/loathe.

But at the end of the day you decide that you really do have to send e-mail, the best thing to do is to keep it short. That is, if you want people to actually read the e-mail.

(Note that this draft mentions that Chico’s current mail system is “competing” with the big web-based email providers, like Google and MS. It’s not. A lot of things change in a year.)

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Without getting into the “ASU is a huge research school and Chico is something different” discussion, let’s look with fondness upon ASU’s collaboration with Google:

The range of technology solutions that Google is putting forward, at the speed and scale that they have proven they can deliver them, is sparking nothing short of a revolution in the IT business, completely changing the paradigm for how hardware/software solutions are created and delivered. Allying with Google gives ASU access not only to today’s innovative Google Apps suite — that is an order of magnitude better than what ASU could field on its own — but it also puts ASU on an accelerated technology trajectory that is capable of keeping pace with the leaders in the field.

There is some real value here, despite the hyperbole. Let’s say Chico did an ASU-style email integration for students. Substantial value will be derived from the effect the “accelerated technology trajectory” will have on users.

Central IT at Chico fights the technology/innovation war on many fronts: email, learning/course management, classroom technology, computer labs and lab services, campus web development, student records/registration, and many more. When we’re successful, we get solid buy-in from the campus community in the product or service we roll out. When we’re not, we see the innovators and business-driven folks outside of central IT cobble together solutions that work for them.

Sometimes we win outright: department-owned campus portals aren’t popping up, nor are departments or colleges creating their own “smart” classrooms. Sometimes we win and lose; the campus LMS systems are serving most campus needs, although the implementation of an open source LMS by the campus continuing education center is being driven to fit its business needs not met by the standard campus LMS’s.

And sometimes, we can’t catch a break; the student e-mail system, despite being upgraded with a nice front end and a stable (compared to its predecssor) back end just two years ago, is thrashed about by spam attacks, a decidedly unhappy marriage to the campus student information system, and competition from all of the other web-based email systems out there, which the vast majority of students come to Chico already using.

Click thumbnail for full-size

Yeah, me either…

I should seriously just forward my Wildcatmail it to my GMail account…

23 megabytes! Oy vey! Currently the student email system catches SPAM before it gets to your inbox and sets it aside in a SPAM folder. Once a message has been there for 60 days, it’s delete forever. So, my account has received 23 megabytes of SPAM in less than 60 days. Making a big assumption, if we figure that every student who has an email account also has roughly 20 megabytes of SPAM, that’s:

(20 MB x 30,000 students with email accounts) / 1024 = 586 gigabytes of SPAM on the campus mail servers.

That’s roughly 1/3 of the disk space that the campus needs to ensure each student can have a 50 MB quota for their mailbox.

Even if my mailbox has twice the average amount of spam (since it’s been an active account for 6 years) that’s still close to 300 gigabytes of SPAM.

Now, I know they say storage is cheap, but if the policy was modified to permanently expire SPAM after 30 days, instead of 60, it’s reasonable to believe that we might be able to reclaim a few hundred gigabytes of disk space. That could translate into an increase in the quota size for student e-mail. Granted, that increase might only be 5-10 megabytes, but for my money, it’s a more productive use of disk space.

This also demonstrates my main peeve with CSS layouts.