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

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

#21

Post by _yb2s »

perihelions wrote: post #13

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.

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

#22

Post by rty32 »

josh2600 wrote: post #10

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.

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

#23

Post by edm0nd »

rylittle wrote: post #3

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 :)

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

#24

Post by shepherdjerred »

daemonologist wrote: post #9

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.

My university did this recently, too. So silly.

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

#25

Post by manav »

perihelions wrote: post #13

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.

Their email systems are managed by Google Workspace.

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

#26

Post by taxman22 »

edm0nd wrote: post #23
rylittle wrote: post #3

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?

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

#27

Post by shepherdjerred »

electriclove wrote: post #5

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

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

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

#29

Post by hooverd »

nullhole wrote: post #6

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!
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