Meanwhile, the self-hosted mail server for the CS department @cs.hmc.edu still hosts accounts for all the alumni and will for the foreseeable eternity. I can still SSH into the current department cluster and read two decade old (or two second old) emails using mutt. If their cluster somehow ever runs out of disks, I'm happy to donate a terabytes worth, but like hell I'm giving money to big-G for cloud storage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Open_Infrastructure_f... ("Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing")
They are Kropotkin when you are volunteering for them, and neutron-bomb Jack Welch when you expect something of them.
Academic administration that makes decisions about things like e-mail account policies is an entirely different thing from research labs doing projects like BOINC, ultimately controlled by the state government- although it can and does choose to delegate some responsibilities to academic faculty.
I was supposed to have just 10 GB of storage total. We complained, so at least now it's 30 GB. Still it's borderline low for me because of the kind of data we collect and collaborative work.
I'm looking for a solution in the mean time; trying to change my workflow.
Professors, staff and registered students etc, on the other hand, is easier to deal with.
This could be done in perhaps the opposite direction: individual alumni donors tying donations to maintenance of email accounts for all alumni.
These email addresses, in some cases, must date back to the 90s or earlier. Cancelling them is a major, negative change to people who (like me!) who have come to rely on them.
Under protest by the people managing the service, the university administration switched from a locally hosted service to the microsoft suite.
Now that there's a (probably very large) line item in the bill from MS to support email for people who don't pay tuition, there's got to be pressure from the beancounters to just drop the perk.
Alumnis beware of Microsoft
Yeah, your account's getting deleted. You should start backing up important emails now.
TLDR: Google Workspace for Education rug pulled schools on their "unlimited" plans, and the deadline is coming up to avoid paying extra fees. This was communicated in advance, but maybe still a bit quick for a large institution
> From: (Jan 2023) We currently store 12.4 PB of data across all Google services, and our new storage cap, without significant additional fees, is 1.9 PB.
See the timeline [1]. They have been forcing the rest of the university to reduce their usage. Finally it's time for alumni. There's no need for a fuss on HN about this. There's a lot more belt tightening across the university.
I'm not seeing the legitimate use for 5GB of email. Delete your attachments and it has to be fine. Annoying? Sure, but you can search email for large attachments. How bad could it be. I'm sure they follow a power law, so deleting a few of them should do it for "legitimate" over-quota users.
[1]: https://bconnected.berkeley.edu/projects/google-cost-reducti...
Here's the deets: https://bconnected.berkeley.edu/projects/google-cost-reducti...
Google has been raising the rates of the workspace products every year it seems. I was originally using “G Suite” just for email and it used to cost $3-4/user/month. Now it’s costing me $7-8 per month on Google Workspace.
I suspect the provost or uni president cut the IT budget and this is an unfortunate result.
which actually turns out to be a win, because because they arent tied to the university itself, they can impose a 5gb cap, stop accepting new alumni, and carry on. and a .com is often easier to say over the phone than subdomain.school.edu
Source-- I still have a valid EDU email and graduated in 2023.
(Although I think @berkeley.edu is likely the most famous .edu? (because of BSD and all the man pages?))
If you have the resources, would encourage you to pay for email so your provider has less flexibility to boot you the moment your account is an inconvenience.
Your average random is more likely to have heard of Harvard or MIT than Berkeley
I’m Australian. I think most educated Australians have heard of Harvard. You don’t even have to be “educated”, maybe you just saw The Social Network (or one of several other popular films featuring Harvard). How many Australians have heard of University of California at Berkeley? I think far less.
If you are an American who watches Fox News, you would have seen numerous stories about Harvard over the last 12 months. How many stories has Fox News run about Berkeley in the same period?
MIT is probably somewhat less famous than Harvard, but still vastly greater odds a random person who has lived their whole life on the other side of the planet has heard of it than Berkeley.
Berkeley is somewhat famous in the software field, but the vast majority of people have nothing to do with software development and hence know nothing about it
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_SMTP_server_return_cod...
Receiving but not sending seems like a nice enough compromise.
maybe this is a trend and should be used for all websites.
make small data great again?
permanent vanity addresses tied to accomplishments, clubs etc should be a straightforward business or product for google, microsoft, cloudflare etc to offer.
or patch dns to allow the sale of email addresses, and process all forwards (with the forwarding address stored privately) before processing other mx records.
none of that should take up much storage.
Perhaps still peanuts for UC Berkeley and worth it, I don't know, but it's not just writing a 100k check.
16TB drives are available for ~$150:
https://www.amazon.com/Exos-SATA-512E-%E5%86%85%E8%94%B5%E3%...
12,400TB is 775 16TB drives. Add 20% for redundancy and this is 930. At $155 this is <$150,000, not $250,000, and this is the primary expense.
> You also need almost 100 servers to host that many drives
No you don't, you put them in an array container, which will hold 24-48 drives, e.g.:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/226215269668
Those hold 48 drives, so you'd need 20 of them and they're ~$300. It doesn't even move the needle.
> Then they'd have to pay maybe $500k/yr for three sysadmins (including benefits)
Why on earth would you need three sysadmins? After the initial setup this is a part time job for one person, and you probably already have that person because they're the ones dealing with all the problems caused by unreliable cloud vendors and forced SaaS software changes.
> Then some amount for tape backups, connectivity, electricity, maintenance.
Tape is cheap. Universities already have fiber. Maintenance contracts are for bureaucrats, you just use commodity parts and then keep a few spares. Electricity is going to be some tens of thousands of dollars a year. This is all still "on the order of $100,000", i.e. the price has that number of significant figures. Then annual cost is actually less because the drives etc. will last for more than a year.
Probably not the worst use of time, but you'd need to find interested students and faculty year-over-year.