Email for students

[Jamo]

I am interested to know what other schools policy is regarding student emails. At present all our students use RM Easymail plus and they are restricted to sending and receiving emails to and from our domain only. Without this restriction we found we were getting inundated on the Manager account, with filtered emails including spam, misspellings etc.

We are now considering opening up the system so that at least the Year 10 and 11's can email anywhere. Do other schools check all filtered emails and allow this sort of access?

Also do you allow staff to access their personal email accounts in school such as Yahoo and Hotmail?

[FN-GM]

We allow students to e-mail anybody. There are big letters on the disclaimer informing the recipient they are students. Every e-mail sent there is a copy sent to another inbox.

[techman]

We use Google Apps for student email and MS Exchange (on a separate domain) for Staff email.

 

Both staff students can check their personal email accounts as well.

 

The content of emails is not monitored.

[webman]

Students can send and receive to and from anywhere, but their accounts are subject to a naughty word filter.

 

Neither staff or students are permitted to access their own personal accounts - our own server is the only email service that users are allowed to use.

[jcollings]

All our students use the email in our VLE (LP+/Sharepoint/Exchange/OWA). This is subject to a filtering process.

 

Before that they all had CLEO email accounts.

[mb2k01]

Students and Staff both have access to email via Exchange.

All accounts are scanned (in and out) using Policy Patrol from Red Hat Software which deals with Keywords, Spam, attatchments, custom rules etc.

 

Neither staff or students can access any other mail service (we use RM SafetyNet Plus and have the web based mail filter switched on).

The view is that

1) We can't control or restrict content from an external email source, and as it might be inappropriate or virused it is prohibited and

2) As all have school-based email, there should be no requirement to access personal mail

(in terms of staff access this causes the occasional comment/query now and again, but when you point out that the use of the Internet connection is for teaching and learning purposes only, and that personal addresses should not be used for work etc, the discussion doesn't carry on much longer!)

[Sylv3r]

We have just rolled out Zimbra to all of our students this week, come September all general webmail will be blocked for staff and students. Forcing them to use their school provided accounts only. The Zimbra system links with AD which is an added bonus.

 

FirstClass (Staff) and Zimbra (Students).

[Spitfire]

We use G-mail at Google, takes all the worry out out running another exchange server just for students, it's easy to setup and maintain, bulk upload of students in the form of a csv file