UC Berkeley will delete all alumni email accounts with >5GB stored
twitter.comThey'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.
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.
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.
Distributed computing is a different beast than a storage service for students for stick all their pirated media on.
Their email systems are managed by Google Workspace.
Then the obvious solution is to instead have them managed by their CS department. And fire whoever previously thought it should be otherwise.
They would probably crack down on storage more if they had to run their own storage arrays.
Why? 5GB of storage is like five cents of storage.
You can’t be serious? I can’t think of a bigger waste of time.
For the people who write the SMTP RFCs and teach students how to implement them to have hands-on experience operating a mail system?
This wouldn't be RFC work, this would be sysadmin work.
Probably not the worst use of time, but you'd need to find interested students and faculty year-over-year.
Students do worse for less money in the search of internships all time.
I believe the impetus is just Google cancelling the free unlimited storage for education institutions.
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.
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.
I 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.
Let me guess. There's no easy way out of their cloud.
Yep. Cal uses Google Workspaces.
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.
University of South Florida did it for security reasons. I'm guessing after they switched from google accounts to Microsoft ones. :(
My university did this recently, too. So silly.
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.
Sounds like great job for a quick python script and/or some automation :)
How 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?
In 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.
Use google takeout to get all of the emails.
Stupid question: why don't they just offer to let Alumni pay for their content storage?
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.
> 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.
Tying it to donations brings its own set of issues, such as disallowing tax write-offs due to a received benefit.
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.
Because they just don't want to deal with it
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.
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!
Florida International University switched to Microsoft too and they deleted all alumni emails in the process.
Alumnis beware of Microsoft
> 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.
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
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...
The 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.
You'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.
> With some amount of redundancy and growth that would be 24TB of drive capacity at least. You're looking at $250k in drives alone.
16TB drives are available for ~$150:
https://www.amazon.com/Exos-SATA-512E-%E5%86%85%E8%94%B5%E3%...
12,400TB is 775 16TB drives. Add 20% for redundancy and this is 930. At $155 this is <$150,000, not $250,000, and this is the primary expense.
> You also need almost 100 servers to host that many drives
No you don't, you put them in an array container, which will hold 24-48 drives, e.g.:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/226215269668
Those hold 48 drives, so you'd need 20 of them and they're ~$300. It doesn't even move the needle.
> Then they'd have to pay maybe $500k/yr for three sysadmins (including benefits)
Why on earth would you need three sysadmins? After the initial setup this is a part time job for one person, and you probably already have that person because they're the ones dealing with all the problems caused by unreliable cloud vendors and forced SaaS software changes.
> Then some amount for tape backups, connectivity, electricity, maintenance.
Tape is cheap. Universities already have fiber. Maintenance contracts are for bureaucrats, you just use commodity parts and then keep a few spares. Electricity is going to be some tens of thousands of dollars a year. This is all still "on the order of $100,000", i.e. the price has that number of significant figures. Then annual cost is actually less because the drives etc. will last for more than a year.
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?
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.
not 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
I still sometimes have to use mine to provide I attended college!
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.
An .edu email address can be useful for several things. Testing software, getting academic subscriptions.
Many .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.
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.
You can import all of your emails into gmail. It can take a few days or more. Then just empty the mailbox.
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?))
Swapping one free email for another might be kicking the can down the road.
If you have the resources, would encourage you to pay for email so your provider has less flexibility to boot you the moment your account is an inconvenience.
> (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
Just read email wiki -- didnt realize Eric Schmidt (goog) was the creater of berknet in 1978
he also wrote lex
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.
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...
What costs, aside from those imposed by service providers like MS/Google? Storage is not that expensive for a normal user.
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?
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.
excellent idea!
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.