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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

#31

Post by munchler »

rr808 wrote: post #28

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

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.

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

#32

Post by Petersipoi »

rr808 wrote: post #28

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.

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

#33

Post by hooverd »

josh2600 wrote: post #10

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

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.

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

#36

Post by bangaladore »

spiritplumber wrote: post #30
rr808 wrote: post #28

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

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.

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

#37

Post by throw7 »

rr808 wrote: post #28

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

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.

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

#38

Post by twbarr »

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.

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

#40

Post by hooverd »

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...

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