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.
I believe the impetus is just Google cancelling the free unlimited storage for education institutions.
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.
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.
Stupid question: why don't they just offer to let Alumni pay for their content storage?
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.
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
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...
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.
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...
I can't think why I'd want to keep an email account from my old university. Is that really a thing?
You can import all of your emails into gmail. It can take a few days or more. Then just empty the mailbox.
I wonder how much of that email was letters from the University asking for money?
Good. This shouldn't be a limitless service. There are costs involved and it is nice they offer alumni email accounts at all.
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.
The Bastard Operator From Hell
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?
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.
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.