Re: [tlug] outsourcing email service

[<stephen@example.com>]

Micheal Cooper writes:

 > True. Email is private, as in conversation, as in a conversation at a 
 > shopping mall. It is very easy to eavesdrop on one of the many 
 > conversations going on as people pass by, but you should refrain from 
 > doing so.

Sure.  But as an admin, you should think like a military planner: in
terms of threats, not the likely outcome or the ethics that *other*
people should follow---some of them won't.

You should also remember that while it's possible to sneak up on two
people talking in a shopping mall, they are aware that they're *not
private*.  User reaction to having their email "leak" is unlikely to
be the same.

Back in the day my department had a minicomputer, and the setup was
that the wordprocessing program lived in a directory called "wp", and
each user had the equivalent of a folder and a group (this was VMS, so
it was done with ACLs, I forget the details).  The idea was that the
faculty would either type in or have the typist type in the manuscript
content, and then a skilled technical typist would fix up the
equations and the standard TR format.  So the the secretaries were
members of each personal group.

Of course there were also forms for memoranda and letters and so on,
which the faculty would mostly type in directly.  One day a
particularly s**theaded (in several senses) colleague wrote an epistle
to the chair bitching about the "attitude" of one of the senior staff,
Michaela, put it in a file named "margaret", and you can imagine the
rest ... except maybe the fact that Prof S went postal and demanded
that *Albert*, the sysadmin, be fired for letting his "private" memo
leak to the staff.

User (and worse, senior administrator) intuitions are not necessarily
going to correspond to technical reality.  In this particular case,
Albert and Michaela got treated to a really nice lunch by the chair
for their trouble, so not all senior admins are idiots. :-)