On Feb 2, 2006, at 5:26 PM — 2/2/06, Eric Thomas wrote:

> Having worked in academia for 13 years, I suspect that it is still  
> true
> today that, given a good reason, and any of my former bosses would  
> be the
> first to say that this kind of fee level is a VERY good reason, the
> university can simply decide that AOL accounts use the university's  
> e-mail
> services at their own risk. If it works, great! If it doesn't, too  
> bad.
> After all, the university does provide e-mail accounts for every  
> student,
> teacher, etc.

There's some grain of reality to that, however, times are a bit  
different now in the academic world than they were years ago.  
Distance education is a common learning model in many large  
university. The distances can be thousands of miles between teacher,  
students, and email servers. For example, we have many students in  
Japan who rely on communications from our LISTSERV in Philadelphia.  
Those students are free to use our central email server, but from a  
practical standpoint, they tend to use local providers. I suspect  
some of your other educational customers are in the same boat as we  
are here at Temple.

This is not a complaint, just an observation. I am grateful to Erik  
for making me aware of this situation. I suspect a lot of  
universities will simply tell their AOL users to look in their junk  
mail folders frequently and encourage those students to find other  
means of handling their email (including using university resources).  
I know that if this policy by AOL is fully implemented in June, they  
will probably not get a dime from us because our fiscal year begins  
in July and our budget for this fiscal year is already spoken for as  
far as I know.