UC Berkeley will delete all alumni email accounts with >5GB stored

[twbarr]

They'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.

[perihelions]

That'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_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.

[UniverseHacker]

There 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.

[hooverd]

Distributed computing is a different beast than a storage service for students for stick all their pirated media on.

[manav]

Their email systems are managed by Google Workspace.

[kccqzy]

I believe the impetus is just Google cancelling the free unlimited storage for education institutions.

[pks016]

Yup. 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]

It 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.

[lostmsu]

Let me guess. There's no easy way out of their cloud.

[alephnerd]

Yep. Cal uses Google Workspaces.

[daemonologist]

The 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]

University of South Florida did it for security reasons. I'm guessing after they switched from google accounts to Microsoft ones. :(

[shepherdjerred]

My university did this recently, too. So silly.

[rylittle]

Same 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]

Sounds like great job for a quick python script and/or some automation :)

[josh2600]

Stupid question: why don't they just offer to let Alumni pay for their content storage?

[rty32]

Once 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.

[hooverd]

Billing 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.

[ronsor]

Because they just don't want to deal with it

[nullhole]

I'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.

[hooverd]

Yea, it happened to me. Switched from Gmail for students and O365 for staff to O365 for everyone. And no more alumni email! Boo! Hiss!

[bogwog]

Florida International University switched to Microsoft too and they deleted all alumni emails in the process.

Alumnis beware of Microsoft

[gaws]

> 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.

[cheepin]

Here's why: 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]

This 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-reducti...

[hooverd]

The 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-reducti...

[xyst]

Berkeley 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.

[kkfx]

Well, 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...

[rr808]

I can't think why I'd want to keep an email account from my old university. Is that really a thing?

[Petersipoi]

Oh 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.

[munchler]

Having 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.

[spiritplumber]

An .edu email address can be useful for several things. Testing software, getting academic subscriptions.

[throw7]

Back in my day, RPI used to have alum shell accounts, but they quickly got rid of those and then quickly moved to just forwarding the alum email address somewhere else. I have no idea what they do now, but the feeling is mutual at this point.

[nullbyte808]

You can import all of your emails into gmail. It can take a few days or more. Then just empty the mailbox.

[samstave]

Or 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?))

[joelkevinjones]

I wonder how much of that email was letters from the University asking for money?

[electriclove]

Good. This shouldn't be a limitless service. There are costs involved and it is nice they offer alumni email accounts at all.

[layer8]

The 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_cod...

[1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3463.html#section-3.3

[shepherdjerred]

What costs, aside from those imposed by service providers like MS/Google? Storage is not that expensive for a normal user.

[declan_roberts]

My 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.

[sshine]

The Bastard Operator From Hell

https://bofh.bjash.com/

[wsdookadr]

it'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]

how 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.

[JojoFatsani]

Now 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.