E-Mail Future Opportunities at UCI
Summary: Allen Schiano presented future opportunities for e-mail at UCI to the Faculty Advisory Group on November 29, 2004.
Goal: OIT recognizes the importance of e-mail in conducting University business and is considering ways in which future e-mail services (and e-mail linked services) could more effectively and extensively meet campus goals.
Among many possibilities are:
- E-mail services for prospective applicants and alumni, i.e., extending UCI-based services from ‘applicants to endowments’
- Expansion of ‘Tiering’ in existing e-mail services:
- Larger disk allocation for faculty and/or staff
- Access to the UNIX shell for complex e-mail manipulations, e.g., procmail use
- Prioritized/segregated ‘channels’ for official University business
- Separate mailboxes for students to receive official e-mail
- ‘secure’ e-mail whose sender can be verified before ‘opening’ e-mail
- More extensive use of predefined folders
- Filtering e-mail to defined folders based on e-mail content, subject, sender, etc.
- Limiting use of ‘inbox’ folder due to its critical function
- Client-level e-mail processing on central systems via simple, i.e., web, interface
- Spam filtering
- Simple procmail usage
- Interaction with other OIT services
- Tie-in to ‘Webfiles’ service for large attachments/file sharing/collaborations – e-mail attachment/detachment
- A school/department/campus Exchange service
- Requests from some campus groups
- Issues:
- Funding for personnel
- What service enhancements would this create?
- Is it scalable on this campus
We are just beginning the information gathering and brainstorming phase are are eagerly open to discussions with and ideas from this group and others.
