[EUROCARE]

That's cool, but you can't give out mailboxes for free like you can give away computers. It needs to run somewhere, the servers maintained by someone. Do you have a better solution than Gmail? I know only about Microsoft, is that even an improvement?

[lrvick]

I host email for hundreds of people with a $10/mo VPS.

Schools classically self hosted their network services and they can do so again. It is a good opportunity to mentor future sysadmins too.

[EUROCARE]

It's great that you do, but that's not a typical school admin skillset. People who know this have zero reason to slave for a school.

> Schools classically self hosted their network services

Back when encryption wasn't even needed, hackers were a curiosity and deliverability wasn't a concern. This is never coming back. School is a very important part of people's lives (parents, children, teachers, other staff), deliverability and security must be perfect.

Schools also manage loads of very private data. As a parent, I don't want the school admin to touch it with a 10-meter pole, I want them to use a managed service that they can't screw up even if they tried very hard (and sometimes school admins look at data themselves - the less opportunity they have the better).

> It is a good opportunity to mentor future sysadmins too.

The point is to have working email that everyone can rely on, not to groom kids/teachers to become sysadmins. It's better for everyone if the school admin focuses on solving things no one else can solve (e.g. handing out the free computers and installing Linux on them) rather than wasting time tinkering with email hosting for public money.

[0xedd]

You can Google free email services rather than use bing.

Protonmail is one. Free version includes much more than what a student needs. Students can sign up themselves.

[EUROCARE]

The point here is data privacy. Freemail means you explicitly hand over your (meta)data as a payment. Students are not going to go for Protonmail, they're going to use their already existing Gmail.

You can't rely on students having their own inboxes anyways. They will claim they forgot the password, it doesn't work, they are not getting teacher's messages, etc etc. You need a place where you can deliver critical information and be sure it arrived, and have a way of proving it was/wasn't read, a way of restoring lost access (without losing the messages), a way of proving that access is possible and happened, a way of recovering deleted messages...

[zelphirkalt]

They can _choose_ to use whatever they want, as long as the school doesn't force them to use proprietary stuff. It is responsibility of the school system to create an ethical learning environment and not to promote proprietary service providers. Gmail probably doesn't finance schools in Denmark either, so even less of a reason for schools there to do no-cost promotion of Gmail. And that is just one example.

Edit: After choosing something different than the school suggests, the pupils then themselves become responsible for making sure it is a suitable alternative to the non-proprietary ethical solution, that the school suggested.

[EUROCARE]

Email inboxes are one of the many services schools buy, it's not about any promotion and of course Google doesn't promote them, this is a service they provide for money, not some barter. This is like saying they promote a catering provider, furniture manufacturer or paper factory by buying from them... It's not like people aren't capable of using other email providers after using Gmail - email looks just the same regardless of the company (usually works worse though), and people have their own email too, their school inbox is usually not their first nor last contact with it.

Pupils' personal email inbox is their own stuff and completely out of the question. We're talking about school-managed inboxes with addresses ending with the school's domain.

[spookie]

>not about any promotion You sure? Last I checked Google, Microsoft, and Texas Instruments have aggressive business deals with the educational sector to make sure no other company gets an edge there. I had to buy a nspire calculator for example, since teachers received commissions for the damn things (while in obligatory school). In university, we had our own servers for various services such as email, until Microsoft came wavering their money around and literally "offering for free" their products for that university.

The sheer market manipulation these companies do is obscene, there really isn't competition, and our kids aren't offered the high quality and respectful services they deserve. In the case of Texas instruments, parents will have their pockets robbed. Thing cost my parents 200 bucks, and the only thing it was used for, was rendering some fancy parabolas.

Anyways, I didn't mean to throw private contracts out the window completely. And, have since clarified that in another reply to this thread.

[EUROCARE]

> You sure? Last I checked Google, Microsoft, and Texas Instruments have aggressive business deals with the educational sector to make sure no other company gets an edge there.

That's because it's a lucrative market you can take with much less negotiation than individual small companies. Every company does that, only few are dealing with the government on the level of Microsoft/Google though.

> I had to buy a nspire calculator for example, since teachers received commissions for the damn things (while in obligatory school).

That sucks, but this is about schools buying Gmail for students' school managed inboxes on the school domain, not about students being forced to use Gmail. This is just like internal company email for example. Students still have their own personal inboxes at whatever service they please.

> The sheer market manipulation these companies do is obscene, there really isn't competition

If there isn't competition, then it's not market manipulation, it's just that they're the only market.

> and our kids aren't offered the high quality and respectful services they deserve

Gmail (and Outlook365) is the highest quality service currently on the market, and since the school is paying for the inbox, Google is not reading the data for ads. You can go for smaller companies with worse offers and much less software included in the subscribtion... But I don't think that's going to be a benefit to the students.

> Thing cost my parents 200 bucks, and the only thing it was used for, was rendering some fancy parabolas.

Again, that sucks, but this is not about parents paying Gmail.