IT department back logs e-mails for faculty and students as security feature

One would not have had to be living under a rock to have allowed a recent hearsay to go unnoticed.

Millersville University’s Information Technology department has, for years, been backing-up logs of University e-mail accounts—logs of when, from and to whom e-mails are sent and received—and the system has been interpreted by some to be an archive of all details of all e-mails.

According to Gregory R. Schmalhofer, Operating Systems Manager with IT, there is virtually no other practical purpose for the back-up than to be an “emergency recovery of information” system.

In other words, in the event of a crash of the system, the existing backed-up data would serve as a refreshing point, so that vital data is not entirely lost.

Schmalhofer explained that though the system could be utilized to uncover data transferred from sender to recipient the data would not reflect the actual content of the communications. IT is simply not physically equipped to store the data required for such a purpose.

Richard Fulmer is a 24-year professor of Social Work at the University and reported neither hearing of a change in the system other than the update over the summer nor a planned transition of the nature and purpose of the said system, which system update Schmalhofer described as follows: “the faculty and staff Exchange email system was updated this past summer from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007.”

“Like our student e-mail backups the faculty and staff Exchange e-mail backup is not intended to archive all faculty and staff e-mail that passes through Exchange at any point in time during the day, but rather it is a once per day backup taken during the evening hours  and is intended primarily for disaster recovery purposes,” Schmalhofer said.
IT is currently in the “initial planning stages to move to a new student e-mail platform,” and that new platform is of the selfsame nature as the abovementioned faculty software update.

As introduced above, the software update, to some, implied new protocol of the back-up system and, concurrently, of the IT department.

Both Veronica Longenecker, director of Academic, Consulting, and Technical Services at IT and Schmalhofer reported no further ulterior motives for the emergency recovery system.