Email for students

[Norphy]

The SMT here has just got word of this new government inititive to get every student in the country a virtual learning centre. There is a big push towards managed learning environments and apparently one aspect of an MLE is an email address for each student. If we stay with Digital Brain or use the Capita learning platform whos name escapes me right now we get this but quite honestly I'd rather host it all in-house.

 

I've been investigating doing this inhouse for a little while and have been considering Exchange. The cost of Exchange Ent Edition and sufficent CALs for all the students is relatively small, just under £2k (£557 for Exchange, £1.07 per CAL) and that is a one off cost. The expensive bit is the antivirus and antispam that would be necessary. Our LEA recommended and quoted us for Sybari Antigen and Antispam which worked out at about £20000 for four years. Looking independantly into other solutions turned out even more expensive (McAfee cost that for antispam alone). It occurs to me that even if we don't go the Exchange route we'll still need to find an antivirus/spam solution and it's going to be really expensive one way or the other and relying on client-side antivirus would be what is technically known as bloody stupid™.

 

I'm wondering if anyone here hosts student emails in house. If you do, what email server do you use and what antivirus/spam solution do you use? How much does it cost per student per year?

 

Cheers,

 

Norphy

[Alex]

ASSP, free + very good

 

Preferably stick it on a seperate server. Windows or Linux.

 

http://assp.sourceforge.net/

[GrumbleDook]

Presently we use FirstClass (also our VLE) at a cost of £4000+ a year with Mail Marshal as the anti-spam / anti-virus relay, but we are looking to move to Exchange in the next 6 months.

 

We will also have the option of all our emails being filtered through the RBC (in fact it is mandatory but we will relax everything and control it in house) and that is included within the costs.

[Ric_]

I use Exchange 2003 Enterprise and have very few problems. I currently don't have anti-spam or anti-virus on email, however anti-virus is provided by the RBC at the mail relay and their anti-spam is due to be implemented soon too. To be honest, we don't get much spam.

 

The whole email address for every kid is nothing new and Becta have had guidance on this for a while. The biggest thing to note is that you are supposed to make sure that the email addresses don't indicate the name and sex of the kid - so make sure that the first name isn't in there.

[GrumbleDook]

And where possible it does not indicate the age of the student either ... so if Andrew Dipstick is in year 8 then having 04adipstick is not a good thing.

[deanc]

We have been running exchange since september now and are now starting to give access to he kids, as we use sophos antivirus we have access to thier puremessage product which does both the antivirus and antispam, we are planning to implement som more mail filtering software just to make sure that the little darlings arent up to anything.

[john]

Exchange for years here, for 2 years used Sophos Puremessage Anti-V and Anti-Spam. You don't pay per mailbox or anything like that so its good value for money, we got it as part of a bundle for workstations as well, so we paid for 300 workstations and then a little more for the Puremessage stuff but were fully covered. Also we use the Exchange Inteligent Message Filter, and thats again a brilliant MSFT freebie, that helps reduce the spam loads, but then Puremessage does very very well as well.

[Norphy]

Thanks for the replies guys.

 

Are you sure that Sophos isn't done on a per mailbox scheme? I'm looking at Ramesys' site atm and all I see is per mailbox schemes. I'll email my contact there tomorrow methinks and find out more

[john]

Maybe it was a special offer from Sophos for us, we have used them for 8 years and had a lot of outstanding issues with them still at that point, so maybe it was a good will offer for our last 18 months of the licence?? I will have to check out as its due for renewal in 4 months time and I am ditchign the servers and clients Sophos for Symantec I think, so I better start researching.

 

Also we deal direct with Sophos as schools can, and they were cheaper than all the distys were for it.

[rupturedtoad]

The mail server I run is postfix on a linux box using ClamAV (free) for virus checking and the Spamhaus RBL (also free) for spam.

 

This is for staff - students don't have email but use an in-house developed messaging system.

[Geoff]

We have a Linux box running Postfix + SpamAssassin + ClamAV + Sophos scanning inbound and outbound mail. There's no internal user to user checking possible but I don't believe it to be a major issue.