Hi -

We have a requirement at our university to provide lifetime email to our students. We already have a groupwise mail server for employees. We want to outsource the provider of student email.

One obvious solution is to have all email going to one place but there is strong resistance to changing groupwise for employees and currently it does not make sense to extend groupwise to students.

Both student and employee email will have the same domain. Can this be done? Any ideas on how we can implement that? Any ideas will be appreciated.

Thanks in Advance.

Are you against hosting a different subdomain for the student email? IE:
user@foo.com employees
users@stu.foo.com

If this would be acceptable I am sure we can guide you through the changes.

Where I work we have staff and student email systems. I don't know details, but I do know the overview of how it works. Basically we use a third system which receives all the mail and distributes it accordingly.

Everyone has an email address on our organisation's domain, let's say that's @workplace.org. Email for @workplace.org is received by the server(s) that are specified in the MX records for workplace.org and those servers consult a big long aliases file that looks like this

b.smith@workplace.org : jusktr@staffemail
a.jones@workplace.org : rfuref@studentemail

where studentemail and staffemail are hostnames of servers which handle incoming email for that system.

If you outsource your student email then those using the outsourced system will have email addresses that end with @outsourcecompany.org and your mail servers can redirect their @workplace.org addresses to those. Your users continue all to give out their @workplace.org addresses. The outsourced system should also send all email with the appropriate @workplace.org addresses in the From field NOT @outsourcecompany.org. That way you're not screwed if you ever want to change outsourced provider or bring mail back in house.

Unfortunately we cannot have two domains. We can only use foo.com.

Is there a way to do this where a student does not see @outsourcecompany.org? They only see @workplace.org.

I would question the wisdom of providing lifelong e-mail to students without making it obvious who is a student, alum, or staff. The schools that I know of do it like this:

user@staff.university.com
user@student.university.com
user@alum.university.com

That makes management much easier. However, you said that was not an option, so you will need to do things a little differently.

Here is how I would handle it.

I would have all mail for @university.edu routed to the outside provider. I would either have the outside vendor setup mail forwards for staff addresses (optimal), or setup accounts for staff and set up forwards from inside those accounts and have that mail forwarded to the GroupWise system.

Mail from staff to staff would only traverse the GroupWise system all other incoming mail would be routed through the outside vendor to GroupWise, but that could be setup to be virtually invisible (only seen in the headers).

Then you are only left with staff having different setups and webmail access.

As stated above I don't find this an ideal setup, but it should work. I hope you find this helpful.

The Student may or may not see the outsourced company depending on how you handle DNS, Web access . . . But with this setup and your outside providers help you can hide it from students, but not from staff.

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And here I thought I was just about the only remaining GroupWise user.