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UC Berkeley will delete all alumni email accounts with >5GB stored
- josh2600 2y agoStupid question: why don't they just offer to let Alumni pay for their content storage?
- ronsor 2y agoBecause they just don't want to deal with it
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- rty32 2y agoOnce there is a payment, it's a business relationship. You don't want to enter a business relationship with an alumni who graduated many years ago that could be anywhere in the world doing anything, unless you can handle that. (Donations are different though, for whatever reason. It actually wouldn't be a bad idea to tie email storage with donations.) Professors, staff and registered students etc, on the other hand, is easier to deal with.
- nullhole 2y ago> It actually wouldn't be a bad idea to tie email storage with donations. 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.
- alach11 2y agoTying it to donations brings its own set of issues, such as disallowing tax write-offs due to a received benefit.
- hooverd 2y agoBilling is hard. University IT pays for X amount of storage across their Google Workspace tenant. For edus, you get a 100TB pool and can buy more storage in 10TB increments. It's not metered per user either.
- nullbyte808 2y agoYou can import all of your emails into gmail. It can take a few days or more. Then just empty the mailbox.
- samstave 2y agoOr thunderbird for more portability - Create a free Proton.me and pipe them into that. (Although I think @berkeley.edu is likely the most famous .edu? (because of BSD and all the man pages?))
- skissane 2y ago> (Although I think @berkeley.edu is likely the most famous .edu? (because of BSD and all the man pages?)) 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
- rylittle 2y agoSame thing happened at UofMichigan. Luckily, they gave us 15gb and most of my storage over that was from photos, but i had 100s of gigs. So I had to scramble to move them all to an external harddrive using google takeout, which itself was a huge PITA, mainly because the UI is so horrible it required me to manually click download on every individual 5gb zip.
- edm0nd 2y agoSounds like great job for a quick python script and/or some automation :)
- taxman22 2y agoHow do you write “a quick python script” to export data from a Google account across many products and data types, while dealing with rate limits, API limitations, etc?
- thot_experiment 2y agoIn 2024 you can probably just paste the API docs into ChatGPT/llama/Claude and ask, it would probably even write a headless chrome script for you. Rate limits aren't real for individuals downloading individual amounts of things, just shove a laptop into a closet and download a file every minute or something and check on it once a day. This isn't a hard problem to solve.
- declan_roberts 2y agoUse google takeout to get all of the emails. https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout?pli=1 https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout?pli=1
- electriclove 2y agoGood. This shouldn't be a limitless service. There are costs involved and it is nice they offer alumni email accounts at all.
- layer8 2y agoThe correct thing to do is to send a 552 5.2.2 Mailbox full [0][1], not to delete the account. Email account quota is a standard feature of mail servers. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_SMTP_server_return_codes#%E2%80%94_5yz_Permanent_negative_completion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_SMTP_server_return_cod... [1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3463.html#section-3.3 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3463.html#section-3.3
- shepherdjerred 2y agoWhat costs, aside from those imposed by service providers like MS/Google? Storage is not that expensive for a normal user.
- nullhole 2y agoI'm worried about this happening at my alma mater. 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.
- bogwog 2y agoFlorida International University switched to Microsoft too and they deleted all alumni emails in the process. Alumnis beware of Microsoft
- hooverd 2y agoYea, it happened to me. Switched from Gmail for students and O365 for staff to O365 for everyone. And no more alumni email! Boo! Hiss!
- gaws 2y ago> the university administration switched from a locally hosted service to the microsoft suite. Yeah, your account's getting deleted. You should start backing up important emails now.
- daemonologist 2y agoThe University of Oklahoma wiped out all alumni email accounts a couple of years ago (after explicitly promising they would be retained), regardless of data stored. Didn't affect me too much but it still struck me as an extremely shortsighted move - cut off contact with any professors or peers who only had your school address just to save on a couple of mail servers.
- dzonga 2y agoUniversity of South Florida did it for security reasons. I'm guessing after they switched from google accounts to Microsoft ones. :(
- shepherdjerred 2y agoMy university did this recently, too. So silly.
- perihelions 2y agoThat's hilarious. Isn't this the same "Berkeley" that runs a sustained 20 petaflop distributed supercomputer from freely-donated volunteer machines? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Open_Infrastructure_for_Network_Computing 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.
- _yb2s 2y agoThere is no "they" - academic research labs are funded by their own grants, and are pretty close to being separate companies that just rent space from the university. BOINC is funded by donations and grants from the NSF and NASA. 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.
- manav 2y agoTheir email systems are managed by Google Workspace.
- AnthonyMouse 2y agoThen the obvious solution is to instead have them managed by their CS department. And fire whoever previously thought it should be otherwise.
- hooverd 2y agoThey would probably crack down on storage more if they had to run their own storage arrays.
- AnthonyMouse 2y agoWhy? 5GB of storage is like five cents of storage.
- cheepin 2y agoHere's why: https://bconnected.berkeley.edu/projects/google-cost-reduction-project https://bconnected.berkeley.edu/projects/google-cost-reducti... 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
- fn-mote 2y agoThis is it 100%. > 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-reduction-project/google-project-timeline https://bconnected.berkeley.edu/projects/google-cost-reducti...
- AnthonyMouse 2y agoThe cost of 12,400TB of storage is on the order of $100,000. UC Berkeley has an annual budget of over $3,000,000,000, i.e. this is 0.003% of their annual budget. Also, it's Berkeley, they probably have that kind of hardware sitting around. They should just stop using Google services.
- tredre3 2y agoYou're grossly underestimating the cost. With some amount of redundancy and growth that would be 24TB of drive capacity at least. You're looking at $250k in drives alone. You also need almost 100 servers to host that many drives, so another $250k. Then they'd have to pay maybe $500k/yr for three sysadmins (including benefits). Then some amount for tape backups, connectivity, electricity, maintenance. Perhaps still peanuts for UC Berkeley and worth it, I don't know, but it's not just writing a 100k check.
- kccqzy 2y agoI believe the impetus is just Google cancelling the free unlimited storage for education institutions.
- alephnerd 2y agoYep. Cal uses Google Workspaces.
- pks016 2y agoYup. They reduced our storage by a lot with no alternatives so far. 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.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y agoIt is sad IMO, yours may differ, that educational institutions, once among the pioneers of the internet, are now relying on an advertising company for something as basic as email.
- kccqzy 2y agoI don't think that's sad at all. When the internet and email were trailblazing technology it was right that the educational institutions were the pioneers. Now they are boring old technology and they can outsource that. Maintaining email systems isn't research and won't lead to many papers.
- lostmsu 2y agoLet me guess. There's no easy way out of their cloud.
- rr808 2y agoI can't think why I'd want to keep an email account from my old university. Is that really a thing?
- spiritplumber 2y agoAn .edu email address can be useful for several things. Testing software, getting academic subscriptions.
- bangaladore 2y agoMany .edu discount services do not work just because an email as .edu in it. They scan databases for active students. Source-- I still have a valid EDU email and graduated in 2023.
- munchler 2y agoHaving a .edu email can be very useful for getting access to academic information. Heck, I even used my alumni email to create a Facebook account way back when it was for universities only.
- Petersipoi 2y agoOh yes. EDU emails are a hot commodity. And there have been a lot of crack downs lately on who can have them. The number of free and heavily discounted items you can get with them makes them quite valuable.
- declan_roberts 2y agoI still sometimes have to use mine to provide I attended college!
- basch 2y agonot all alumni email addresses are .edu. 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
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- joelkevinjones 2y agoI wonder how much of that email was letters from the University asking for money?
- twbarr 2y agoThey're in the process of doing this for alums @hmc.edu too. Google baited us into moving the whole infrastructure into the cloud and now are switching us to something the alumni association can't afford. 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.
- hooverd 2y agoThe default of a 100TB shared storage pool seems hilariously low for a university. It's not surprising why Google made that all. Students were probably storing TB of anime and whatever else on their drives. It was crazy when we looked at the storage usage at my uni. Here's the deets: https://bconnected.berkeley.edu/projects/google-cost-reduction-project https://bconnected.berkeley.edu/projects/google-cost-reducti...
- declan_roberts 2y agoMy alma mater only let us keep our email long term if we set up forwarding. Receiving but not sending seems like a nice enough compromise.
- xyst 2y agoBerkeley appears to offload email, calendar, and other services to Google workspace. A quick dig of MX records for Berkeley.edu show Google mail servers. 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.
- sshine 2y agoThe Bastard Operator From Hell https://bofh.bjash.com/ https://bofh.bjash.com/
- wsdookadr 2y agoit's clear. nobody needs more than 5GB. they won't exist if they need more and this ensures the statement is true. maybe this is a trend and should be used for all websites. make small data great again?
- basch 2y agohow about all alumni email addresses just become forward and reverse proxy relays. let me just add a forwarding address, and provide outbound mail. 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.
- wsdookadr 2y agoexcellent idea!
- kkfx 2y agoWell, there are some things, one is that no student at least after the first year should being so incapable to having such large maildirs on an uni provided email service, another is that in the USA it's not like in the EU, students pay, MUCH, so essentially they need to be treated as customers, not wannabe $something in a public service...
- JojoFatsani 2y agoNow I didn’t go to a fancy shmancy alt-ivy but there’s something kinda juvenile to me about using your school email address post your studies. Kinda like staying on your parents’ phone plan into your 30’s.