As soon as this news broke, I reached back out to VP Rampp and expressed my disappointment and also asked "why?"

Her response is below.  Though pleasant and thorough, there is just NOT ENOUGH justification for terminating a program we paid for!  Additionally, I am very disappointed to learn that the Alumni Board agreed to this change.

VP Rampp states that "many" Alumni email accounts are inactive.  Moving forward, this petition will encourage F&M to continue to "email-for-life" to adopt an "opt-in" model.  This is a reasonable compromise to limit the number of Alumni accounts subject to costs and security concerns, while providing the continued resource to interested persons.

Please continue to share this petition and our message.

-Dan

The text of her email is below:

Thank you for reaching out.  I certainly appreciate your concern and frustration.  Making the decision to eliminate a program is never an easy one and not something I take at all lightly.  I was not here approximately 12 years ago when the program began, so I cannot speak entirely for the thoughts of those involved. I do know that at the time the thought of a program like this had many upsides and very few downsides so I can imagine their enthusiasm when thinking of creating it.  However, during my 10 years at the college I have seen how technology has evolved.  I can imagine at the time the thought of ‘just providing an email address’ seemed pretty straightforward, even as the potential number of eligible alumni would grow year over year.

Today, the world of technology is quite a bit different and some of the challenges we face (not unique to F&M or even other sectors) were not fully apparent at that time.  We have been really struggling to maintain this program for some time.  We are a small college IT department with a helpdesk staffed by students.  We are not a large corporate entity readily able to provide email and other cloud services to thousands of people around the world. I thought it might be informative if I shared  just a few of those challenges with you a little more specifically just to add context. I didn’t put them in the original announcement since I didn’t want to overload it with information.

Today, colleges and universities (similar to other sectors) require enterprise features and additional tools that are essential for identifying email-based threats, such as phishing, scams, and malware. These tools, and the vendors that own them, are priced based on the number of user accounts an institution sustains. While current faculty, staff and students would place our license number at a fairly consistent number of approximately 3,000 accounts, today that number exceeds 12,000 with alumni accounts included (many inactive), a number that grows by approximately 600 a year.  As one example, a tool that might cost us $20,000 a year - already a stretch for us to consider financially - was offered to us at more than $100,000 because of the size of our account base.

Email service and storage for higher education was once a free service provided by Google. In 2021, Google announced a storage limit was being imposed with a graduated fee based on the amount of storage being used. This will take effect in 2024. Today, more than half of F&M’s storage usage with Google is from alumni accounts. 

Each week several alumni accounts are reported as being compromised by bad actors.  These need to be investigated and any harm done remediated.  We have dodged quite a number of significant bullets on this front but this isn’t sustainable.  As a small college, we have just one person responsible for information security operations.  We have just one person who manages all of our login services and google services.  Capably protecting F&M’s information resources has grown far more complex over the years and this will only continue to be the case.  However, this work grows dramatically when you move from a few thousand accounts for people generally resident on campus to tens of thousands of accounts around the globe and a threat landscape as large as we face today.  And the assets we need to protect are core to keeping the college open each day.

With these difficult realities facing us, I had to make the difficult decision to recommend the elimination of the program and discuss it with various campus stakeholders, including the College’s Alumni Board.  While no one likes to take away a service, we have had to make that decision in this instance.

I would be more than happy to help you with any transition-related challenges you may have.  Of course, if you have other questions, I’d be happy to try and answer those as well.

Thank you for your understanding.

Carrie