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

https://twitter.com/jachiam0/status/1829546662735560735

by apengwin • 2 years ago

56 68 2 years ago

twitter.com

nullbyte808• 2 years ago

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

samstave2• 2 years ago

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?))

skissane• 2 years ago

(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

0cf8612b2e1e• 2 years ago

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.

rylittle• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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

taxman22• 2 years ago

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?

electriclove• 2 years ago

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

layer8• 2 years ago

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

shepherdjerred2• 2 years ago

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

nullhole2• 2 years ago

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.

bogwog• 2 years ago

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

Alumnis beware of Microsoft

hooverd5• 2 years ago

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!

gaws• 2 years ago

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.

daemonologist• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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

shepherdjerred2• 2 years ago

My university did this recently, too. So silly.

josh2600• 2 years ago

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

ronsor• 2 years ago

Because they just don't want to deal with it

rty32• 2 years ago

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.

nullhole2• 2 years ago

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.

alach11• 2 years ago

Tying it to donations brings its own set of issues, such as disallowing tax write-offs due to a received benefit.

hooverd5• 2 years ago

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.

perihelions• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

manav• 2 years ago

Their email systems are managed by Google Workspace.

AnthonyMouse5• 2 years ago

Then the obvious solution is to instead have them managed by their CS department. And fire whoever previously thought it should be otherwise.

hooverd5• 2 years ago

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

cheepin• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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...

AnthonyMouse5• 2 years ago

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.

kccqzy2• 2 years ago

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

alephnerd• 2 years ago

Yep. Cal uses Google Workspaces.

pks016• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

kccqzy2• 2 years ago

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.

lostmsu2• 2 years ago

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

rr808• 2 years ago

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

spiritplumber• 2 years ago

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

bangaladore• 2 years ago

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.

munchler• 2 years ago

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.

Petersipoi• 2 years ago

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.

declan_roberts3• 2 years ago

I still sometimes have to use mine to provide I attended college!

basch2• 2 years ago

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

throw7• 2 years ago

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.

joelkevinjones• 2 years ago

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

twbarr• 2 years ago

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.

hooverd5• 2 years ago

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...

declan_roberts3• 2 years ago

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.

xyst• 2 years ago

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.

sshine• 2 years ago

The Bastard Operator From Hell

https://bofh.bjash.com/

wsdookadr2• 2 years ago

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?

basch2• 2 years ago

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.

wsdookadr2• 2 years ago

excellent idea!

kkfx• 2 years ago

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...

JojoFatsani• 2 years ago

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.

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

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