Student Emails and Webspace?

[Disease]

The head of IT apporoached me today and asked if I can look at email for students and the ability for them to have their own webspace. Does anyone do this currently and if so how?

I have not settled on any particular OS, Software or spam filters so any suggestions would be greatly appreciated, of course I am looking to do this as cheap as possible.


So whats your setups


Thanks

[nephilim]

buy a domain and hosting that allows unlimited email addresses.

Set up the kids emails for example it could be

JBloggs@schoolnamehere.co.uk

as for webspace, make sure the hosting has enough, then set up enough folders and each user to only have access to there own folder.

[tomdawson]

I'd recommend doing it internally, maybe a LAMP and Zimbra combination? Internally is better for security and keeping track of what's going on. Alternatively you could use a Windows 2003 (or 2008) box with something like MailEnable. Set up all NTFS permissions etc, give students access to their "www folder"; piece of cake.

Alternatively find a shared hosting company that will do you unlimited mailboxes and FTP accounts and stuff. Then you can give FTP access to each student in a subdomain or subdirectory effectively giving them their own webspace. Take a look at Invisional Hosting - unlimited webspace/mailboxes for £50/year.

Certainly the easiest way of going about it but you'll have to weigh up pros and cons re security and junk filtering.

[fiendishlyclever]

If you want a free solution you could use Google Apps or Live@Edu - it depends on what sort of web space he wants. If he wants to upload html then you are probably better setting up a Linux server onsite (I've seen someone use AD to login to/authenticate their webspace).

[Disease]

I want to host it internally, MailEnable looks good does anyone here use it?

[AndySimmo]

For email, there is another it technician who is running the website with cpanel, so that is a possibilty;

atm the kids at our school use the LEA mydesktop & mymail system which we hope to migrate from.

there is also Outlook Live (MS Exchange Server too).

Lot's of possibilites for email!

Our ISP Blocks internal mail so we have to host outside for now until we get an ISA server up and running. (Aparantly they won't open the ports until we have an ISA server due to the LEA). Make sure this is not the case for you!

hehe.

[Sylv3r]

If you take a look on here theres a lot of schools who successfully use Zimbra successfully for staff and students.

[willv28]

We maintain our own Exchange server. People in our system have asked why students in middle/high school don't have email accounts. At least here, it's way too much liability (bullying, misuse, etc). Under no circumstances have we or will we create emails for students. If we did we would just add them to our existing mail system.

[webman]

At least here, it's way too much liability (bullying, misuse, etc). Under no circumstances have we or will we create emails for students.

It's not a perfect solution, but Zimbra has the ability to not deliver messages that contain words that are part of a custom-defined list of bad worlds ("bad word filter" - it's in the wiki). These messages can be dropped into a special mailbox, monitored by certain staff, and the offending students dealt with appropriately.

Here, email is part of most, if not all, ICT-based curriculums; so the onus is on us as a school to provide an email facility for this purpose. It's much better that we have our own system which we can monitor ourselves, than to let them access their own Hotmail/Yahoo/Google/ISP accounts.