Why would Ashford "not support" POP3/IMAP?

Grr. Between online adjunct positions and a few other business/personal email accounts, I have 9 email addresses that funnel into 1 third-party client (POP Peeper - which I'm happy with).

Ashford U (or at least those I've emailed/called) seem to have no idea what POP3 or IMAP access is. They just refer be back to the url for their owa email system. If I push the IT guys, they say "We don't support that." I have tried to do a work-around but they don't even allow email forwarding.

1. Why? For what reason would an institution/business not allow this level of access? They do support mobile access - but I don't do that.

2. Are there any Ashford faculty (or students I suppose) that have figured out how to monitor email without having to log in/out through the owa url?

Thanks!

 

I moved your thread to the IT subforum in hopes that you'll find someone knowledgeable enough to answer your question. - Ted.

 

Hi -

1. IMAP - Horrible protocol that is feature rich and security bad. There's a lot of places that don't allow it, not just Ashford. In fact, I'd say that I've never worked for a company that allowed it on their Exchange environment as a matter of principle.

2. POP - Less of an argument with POP especially with SPOP available. In this case I think it's more of a policy thing.

There are many schools, (mostly career-oriented schools) in the Northeast, that don't want their instructors downloading email to local mail clients for legal/confidentiality reasons as POP allows you to delete what's on the server when it migrates to your mail client. Not a lot of schools have robust inbound and outbound e-discovery tools even if they are backing stuff up; so to cover butts they're dropping POP access.

Simply put, there's a period of time between backups where stuff isn't backed up. If you don't have e-discovery archiving stuff going in and out and you have POP taking stuff off.. there's a risk that you don't have a record of student/teacher conversations if something goes funky, but it's a guarantee that the student or teacher will have a copy.

Bad position to be in. Better to keep everything on the server and maximize your backup opportunities as it's rare that someone will know that something they wrote will go bad before the daily incremental goes off.

 

and with a little bit of google fu and the pop peeper forums:POP Peeper • View topic - OWA support with PP (via 3rd party utility)

In short your program will allow you to connect to OWA to pull the email, but you need to install a plugin, the forum thread explains it.

 

Awesome! Just downloaded! Thanks much.