>university students should be held to a personal responsibility standard where you don't need technical 'verify-ability'... these aren't high school students).
Fair enough. But, in my experience, "my" generation doesn't know any more about computers than their grandmothers. In theory, you could insist that they be responsible for their own e-mail. In practice it'd be a disaster. Even if the e-mail system were perfect, messages would still get lost. Messages would still get accidentally deleted. Having an e-mail system under university control means that mistakes can be undone by the central helpdesk as well as the user.
Another issue with allowing personal e-mail is archiving. If the university is under legal obligation to archive emails, it's much simpler to have a central e-mail system that all messages pass through. That way, there's no legal liability resulting from messages not being archived properly.
Fair enough. But, in my experience, "my" generation doesn't know any more about computers than their grandmothers. In theory, you could insist that they be responsible for their own e-mail. In practice it'd be a disaster. Even if the e-mail system were perfect, messages would still get lost. Messages would still get accidentally deleted. Having an e-mail system under university control means that mistakes can be undone by the central helpdesk as well as the user.
Another issue with allowing personal e-mail is archiving. If the university is under legal obligation to archive emails, it's much simpler to have a central e-mail system that all messages pass through. That way, there's no legal liability resulting from messages not being archived properly.