Re: [SLUG] Webmail - advice sought

[Anand Kumria <wildfire@nospam.progsoc.uts.edu.au>]

On Tue, Jun 20, 2000 at 11:59:51AM +1000, Simon Bryan wrote:
> Hi,
> This is the scenario: High School (in Oz) with 900 students, we did not want 
> the overhead of maintaining email for students so at first banned it altogether 
> then allowed seniors only to use webmail (enforced by SQUID 
> authentication). Now I am regretting that decision, at least 25% of my daily 
> downloads are from webmail sites (mainly hotmail) ie all the advertising and 
> images etc.

well now that you've let them use webmail sites, such as hotmail, wouldn't
they want to have a more transportable email address?

How will you convince them to give up, say, person@nospam.hotmail in favour of
person@nospam.olmc.nsw.edu.au instead?

> What I am asking is....is the following a sensible, or achievable idea?

Certainly a good idea for those whom you aren't giving access to external
mail sites (yet). Check out IMP, which is widely used, acmemail and twig.
(They should show up a in google search).

So as long as you can convince others to give up their current address
it'll be a good idea.

> Set up a webmail server in the school that students can join and which is 
> accessible from the internet.....then I should be able to control all the 
> garbage that goes with it. If it does not have all the whistles and bells of 
> some systems, so be it. We would justify it only on educational grounds 
> anyway, anything more than that then they can do it at home.
> 
> Any advice comments etc appreciated, especially if someone has set one up 
> in a similar circumstance.

IMP uses Javascript; Acmemail requires javascript to be off. I've not 
used twig enough to comment on it. I'd be inclined to recommend IMP, myself.

> We are behind a series of firewalls, running 24/7 but only on a 56k link.

Ouch. You may find you link saturated by webmail then ... I thought
the government was wiring up schools in NSW. What happened to that?

Anand
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