At the last University Senate meeting we were asked about display ads that were showing up on student email accounts. These ads seemed to be closely related to the content of recent email messages. We were specifically asked if Google was ‘reading’ emails to target advertising. I was asked to report on this issue at the February University Senate meeting.

Let me begin by stating that there should never have been ads on our student’s email accounts. There was a mistake when we configured our site with Google. We set a flag that allowed them to deliver ads. The error has been corrected and ads no longer appear.

The question asked however was whether Google ‘reads’ emails. In some sense the answer is yes. Specifically all email is scanned for virus footprints. That is simply the way anti-virus software works. Further all email is scanned for characteristics indicating that it is spam. These statemants are true forB-Mail by Google and are also true for all mail received at Bradley.

For standard customer, Google scans email for keywords matching their list of advertising clients. According to Google policy this is not done for current students, faculty and staff but will be true for Alumni accounts. However, this information is not stored in a database and is not shared with the advertisers!

One could certainly argue that since the service is outsourced, we are at their mercy in terms of continuing this level of guaranteed privacy. We know what their public policy is, but how do we know they abide by that policy. What options would we have if we discover there are privacy issues? The answer is that because our email domain (. . .@mail.bradley.edu ) is owned by Bradley, we can relatively easily move it to another vendor, or back to an on campus service relatively easily.

Why have we contracted with Google to provide this service to our students? What advantages does this service have over our previous webmail service?

• Webmail provided 100 MB of storage for each account - B-Mail, the Google service currently provides 6 GB (That’s equivalent to 6000 MB) of storage space. The current limit for B-Mail is likely to increase, it was 2 GB when we initially contracted with them.
• B-Mail provides personal calendaring for each student. Further we can create as many community calendars as we wish. These calendars can be displayed as a part of your personal calendar if you wish. For example:
  • Any student organization could have a calendar of events that would appear on your calendar if you wish
  • A faculty member could create a calendar for a course. That could show all assignments and class meetings.
• B-Mail by Google provides collaborative space. This is storage where files can be stored and made accessible to a selected group of students. For example students that are assigned to work on a group project in a class can set up space to store their files. This allows everyone involved to have access to the same files without sharing jump drives or sending them via email.
• B-Mail by Google offers an interface to Instant Messaging services.
• B-Mail by Google allows us to allow students to keep their …@mail.bradley.edu account forever.

We (Bradley IRT) are not able to provide these services internally! The bottom line of why we have contracted with Google for this service is that it allows us to facilitate much higher quality services to our students.

An article appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education on January 11, 2008 that examines these issues in some detail. You can read this article at http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i18/18a00103.htm.

I am very happy to announce that our Internet-1 (the normal commodity internet) connection upgrade has been completed. We are very sorry about the delay, but we hope you will appreciate the result. Our connection now consists of a 100 megabit connection to AT&T and a 12 megabit connections to the Illinois Century Network. That makes a total of 112 megabit rather than the previous 57 megabit, a 96% increase!

I can’t guarantee how much faster your normal service will be since both demand and supply are critical to the outcome. I can tell you that we continue to work to find ways to increase our capacity (supply) in cost effective ways. Please share your experiences both good and bad with me by posting comments here.

Chuck

Our goal is for all students, faculty and staff to be able to authenticate (log in) one time using your BUnetID and password and use that authentication to access all services that you are authorized to access. Because this goal is very difficult to reach, we have some interim steps. There are situations where a functionally different userid/password pair are required, but we have ‘synchronized‘ these with your BUnetID. For example, the Active Directory doesn’t really use the BUnetID for authentication, but the userid and password are the same. In these situations you must enter the credentials again even though you are already authenticated.

For the most part this approach works reasonably well, provided we are able to keep your passwords synchronized. This password synchronization works best if you use the password change tool on the Campus tab in MyBU. You will notice that this tool provides some history of when passwords were last changed. This helps to troubleshoot problems caused by passwords being out of sync.

Managing passwords for B-Mail - You will also notice that you are given an option on whether or not to change your B-Mail ‘POP’ password. The reason for this tab is to allow you to better manage your usage of B-Mail. When you use the web interface to access B-Mail, authentication is done against credentials here on campus. However, when you use POP or IMAP to access B-Mail, the authentication must be done at B-mail! This is another example of separate credentials for service access. In this case you actually have separate credentials to access the same data.

To manage your POP/IMAP password:

• To use an email client for B-Mail, you must know your POP/IMAP password. If you don’t know it, use the tool above to change your BUnetID password and also make sure the box is checked to change your POP password. Once you successfully change these, you will know your current POP/IMAP password.
• Configure your email client. There are very good instructions at http://helpdesk.bradley.edu/bmail/POP-IMAP.html.
• When you configure your client, you will enter your POP/IMAP password in the client. If you do not change this password (by unchecking the box in the password change tool), you will not need to change it in the client in the future.

I know many people, particularly those who are graduating this spring, don’t see the need to switch from Webmail to B-Mail. I will start this discussion by explaining why we implemented B-Mail.

What is B-Mail? B-Mail is a Bradley branded product provided by Gmail (Google Mail). It is a relatively new product from Google for Universities. We are in essence contracting with Google to provide email to our students. The system they provide is essentially Gmail but also includes calendaring, contacts, and access to Google Applications.

Why do we want it? Why you should bother to create this account and learn to use it.

• Improved levels of service
  • The level of service that we have been able to provide with Webmail does not meet the needs of many of our students. In fact, many of our students were already using Gmail accounts rather than Webmail. We had serious limitations to the amount of storage space we could provide. We had to limit the size of attachments that could be included in an email. Webmail does not have many of the new features that many students wanted.
  • Currently B-Mail offers a 5 gig storage limit!
  • This approach allows all students to keep their Bradley email address for life. With Webmail we were forced (because of resources) to limit access to your Bradley address to 90 days after graduation.
    
  • On-line calendaring. B-Mail provides an online calendar for each student. This offers the potential for some really interesting capabilities. One of the features is that we can build some universal calendars that each person may access and display as part of their personal calendar. For example:
    • The Music department could build a calendar of musical events on campus - students can display those for themselves.
    • Other departments (Theater,Art, etc.) could do similar things.
    • Athletics could build calendars of basketball games, soccer games, etc. for students to display.
    • I can imagine a time when there would be a calendar for each class taught at Bradley. It would be ‘owned’ by the faculty member teaching the class and could be a calendar based syllabus for the course. Imagine being able to see all the assignments and class meetings for all your classes in one place!
  • Shared Documents. This feature allows you to create documents online without using the Microsoft Office suite of products or upload files from your desktop to this storage space. Once the documents are stored here, they can be shared with other specific people. So a class work group can all have access to the document you are building for the class project. This sharing can include people with B-Mail accounts or can actually be extended to include anyone with a Gmail account.

Why must Webmail and the forwarding of mail go away? Currently many students have both webmail and B-Mail accounts. The default email address in Blackboard is the Webmail address. That means that all mail generated in Blackboard must be sent to Webmail and then forwarded to the B-Mail address. The delays in delivery of this mail makes it a very unattractive alternative. We must convert the rest of the active student accounts to B-Mail and away from Webmail.

B-Mail has its own spam and virus control in that application. By moving all student mail to this venue, we avoid much of the load on our virus and spam services (Barracuda.) This will not only improve services for student email but also for faculty-staff email systems here on campus. In short, you will get your mail much faster by switching to B-Mail.

Finally, Webmail will be turned off on May 17, 2008! Don’t be caught by this date, you will lose all Bradley email services on that date if you do not switch.

ACT NOW - SWITCH TO B-MAIL! - To switch, first connect to mybu.bradley.edu and authenticate by entering your BUnetID and password. Find the frame titled B-Mail Preview and then click on the Sign Up hotlink.

There has been a lot of discussion this fall about the need for improved performance of our internet connection. I want to take this opportunity to discuss what we’ve already done as well as what we are trying to do to improve the situation. This topic requires that I first describe the connections we currently have, which are adequate and which aren’t, how we’re trying to address the ones that are not adequate and what possibilities are on the horizon to improve the situation even more.

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