block hotmail?

Has anyone blocked hotmail, yahoo etc (for students not staff) and forced students to use the school email system, which can be filtered to make sure everythings work related?

Yes, we have recently. We notified the staff first so they could switch, and then removed them all completely.

What sort of reception did you get from students/staff?

Initially a few members of staff didn't like the idea and were given a little longer to adjust. Thankfully it wasn't too much of a problem as most of them were using our webmail anyway. The students obviously didn't like it at all. As punishment, we somtimes withdraw their access to our webmail - this just spurred them on to use their own Yahoo accounts or similar. Now they can't do this, we can better monitor emails as and when necessary and ensure that security is maintained.

You could provide reasons for the actions such as "new policies" and "security - external webmail are more prone to carry infectious messages and is out of the school's control".

We havent had a choice , our LEA has banned all web based email. So yahoo, gmail, hotmail etc have all been blocked.

Got to say , that our staff despise it and complain every day

They'll complain at anything, they're so used to getting their own way all the time :o

hehe true !

The LEA told us that it was a BECTA requirement that Hotmail and other web based email is blocked. I called Becta and spoke to the ISP Accreditation Manager and he told me is was a Crock of S**T. When I challenged the LEA about it they refused effectively to change their stance on it.

I have the same problem at my school. Staff tell me what's the point of school e-mail addresses when they already have Hotmail, Yahoo etc

It is a problem and it's interesting to hear other admins experiences that the only way is to force and block hotmail. I do agree from a monitoring and security point of view it makes good sense as I regularly get junk mail on my hotmail account offering me various products.

Very true.. I don't like the way LEAs are reported to quote BECTa on policies for this that and the other and turn out to be lying about it. Grrr!

Hotmail was blocked years ago when the school got their first proxy server (2000 I think?) due to a student getting an "inappropriate" message (just spam). Since then it has become the norm for Hotmail to be blocked but all other continued to be allowed access. We got our own email server about a year ago.

Student use of Hotmail is not a problem as we use a whitelist so pupils can only access sites we open up. Our problem is with the staff who use hotmail a lot and have built up numerous contacts over the years with it. One of Portsmouth LEA's excuses is that hotmail is insecure and virus ridden, which again is a load of crap.

i think there is a need for it, we see alot of example of kids abusing the piczo service to bully etc, makes me think jst what there sending to each other during lessons on hotmail

Local Authority blocked here - yes - monitoring is the highest concern, and a requirement as far as I understand.

We have our own webmail system, availabler externally - both council employees on the WAN and in our4 school. Everyone uses those and commonly have given up any other email system they used.

We have just blocked hotmail here for students as a parent complained about explicit emails being sent to their daughter by her boyfriend during lesson times. I am in the process of adding yahoo and others to our blacklist of sites for students. I don't block it for staff as if I did I wouldn,t live to see out the day.

Just out of interest we only give our sixth form students and staff access to email. The rest of the school used to have it until a year or so ago when somone sent an obscene email about the head to everyone in the school.

I did it at my last place and it proved worthwhile when trawling the internal system and coming across a group of 14-year olds planning after school sex orgies!

I unblocked access to hotmail and yahoo mail for staff but only as it was asked for and most people understood the reasons behind it.

Remember you do have a duty of care for the little darlings so you should make best efforts to prevent bullying, etc. via electronic means.