JPhurst wrote:
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DanL wrote:
dunno, when I write a government official, I want to use their government email address.

when I communicate on behalf of a business I work for or an organization I represent, I use the appropriate email.

is that really do hard?

About as easy as spelling "too" and yet people don't always do it.

DanL wrote:
dunno, when I write a government official, I want to use their government email address.

when I communicate on behalf of a business I work for or an organization I represent, I use the appropriate email.

is that really do hard?

JPhurst wrote:
A request to a public official inevitably entails them using their role to take some sort of public action. So no, I don't think you can demand confidentiality. Doing so would also squash any sort of ability to investigate corruption because an official could always say "I was servicing my constituent, so you can't ask me what was discussed."

I think there is a difference between allowing a privilege to attach, however, and saying that any record of communication with a constituent is a "record" as defined under OPRA, meaning that it has to be preserved and given to the public upon request.

JPhurst wrote:
I maintain separate e-mail accounts for business and personal. I have my own law practice, as well as an of counsel relationship with a firm, and have separate accounts for both.

...

bodhipooh wrote:
I own a car and pay for parking. Does that make me an expert on automotive mechanical matters?

Pebble wrote:
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bodhipooh wrote:
You should stick to talking about politics, where anything you say is an opinion and does not need to be based on facts. You are WAY OFF. Trust me. I do this for a living. You can most certainly hand over your email hosting using the same domain as whatever other domain you use for business. I routinely do this kind of work for clients. Email hosting is in fact a very efficient thing to do for most enterprises.

As for administration, with many cloud/hosting solutions, you simply submit a ticket to have another user mailbox provisioned. There is no such thing as maintaining accounts, or "distributing memory". When you need an account created, you call your provider and have the account added. When you need an account deleted, or otherwise modified, you reach out to the provider. It really is THAT SIMPLE.

Considering that I own a domain and pay for that hosting...

It really depends on the service provider and what you're paying. Some hosting agents allow for email addresses to have memory allocated. Others just split it.

Lastly, yes, you are correct on hosting. You can split your mail servers from your website hosting servers. I don't believe that it's all that easy as you'd need someone to configure it and maintain it. But that is really all I said that was wrong and it's based more on past experience...

bodhipooh wrote:
You should stick to talking about politics, where anything you say is an opinion and does not need to be based on facts. You are WAY OFF. Trust me. I do this for a living. You can most certainly hand over your email hosting using the same domain as whatever other domain you use for business. I routinely do this kind of work for clients. Email hosting is in fact a very efficient thing to do for most enterprises.

As for administration, with many cloud/hosting solutions, you simply submit a ticket to have another user mailbox provisioned. There is no such thing as maintaining accounts, or "distributing memory". When you need an account created, you call your provider and have the account added. When you need an account deleted, or otherwise modified, you reach out to the provider. It really is THAT SIMPLE.

Pebble wrote:

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bodhipooh wrote:
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moobycow wrote:
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bodhipooh wrote:
I don't buy the argument that "everybody does it" or the (seeming) implication that it is therefore OK.

But, as moobycow indicates, based on what is known of the city IT department (based on previous performance) I would guess that using a private email address is probably a safer bet.

Regardless, there is NO EXCUSE whatsoever to use that as a justification to allow government employees, especially higher ups, to use personal email addresses when conducting city business. Moving the city email service to a privately hosted solution (such as Microsoft Office 365, or Google Mail for Business) is SUPER easy and cost effective. Incredibly so, actually. As IT costs and budgets continue to grow across all industries, there is a very valid argument for local governments to outsource some of those functions to private providers.

It's $3.50/address/month on Office 365 for government (just email, other stuff can run more).

If something doesn't work, the answer isn't to just shrug and break the law, it is to fix it. Especially when there are simple, inexpensive solutions staring you in the face.

Exactly, moobycow! This is such a simple, cheap solution. Even if JC had 1,000 email users, the annual costs would be $42,000, which is less than half the salary of an email administrator. Heck, even if the city had 5,000 employees that needed email addresses, the costs would be justified when you factor in hardware and software costs, as well as yearly licensing costs. This is a no brainer, really.

It really isn?t that simple though the cost wouldn?t be nearly that much.

You can?t just have emails handled if you?re going to use the same domain as your website. You?d need an entire hosting solution from website on down to email.

Additionally, just because they pay for hosting does not mean they wouldn?t need administrators. Someone would need to setup the accounts, maintain the accounts, distribute memory to each account, etc.

Monroe wrote:
Christie should INSTANTLY get a private server, based in the basement of his house in Mendham, for all official and private messaging, and every weekend replace the memory storage and destroy the old storage.

After all, it's ok for Hillary! And everyone else does it!

bodhipooh wrote:
I don't buy the argument that "everybody does it" or the (seeming) implication that it is therefore OK.

But, as moobycow indicates, based on what is known of the city IT department (based on previous performance) I would guess that using a private email address is probably a safer bet.

Regardless, there is NO EXCUSE whatsoever to use that as a justification to allow government employees, especially higher ups, to use personal email addresses when conducting city business. Moving the city email service to a privately hosted solution (such as Microsoft Office 365, or Google Mail for Business) is SUPER easy and cost effective. Incredibly so, actually. As IT costs and budgets continue to grow across all industries, there is a very valid argument for local governments to outsource some of those functions to private providers.

bodhipooh wrote:
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moobycow wrote:
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bodhipooh wrote:
I don't buy the argument that "everybody does it" or the (seeming) implication that it is therefore OK.

But, as moobycow indicates, based on what is known of the city IT department (based on previous performance) I would guess that using a private email address is probably a safer bet.

Regardless, there is NO EXCUSE whatsoever to use that as a justification to allow government employees, especially higher ups, to use personal email addresses when conducting city business. Moving the city email service to a privately hosted solution (such as Microsoft Office 365, or Google Mail for Business) is SUPER easy and cost effective. Incredibly so, actually. As IT costs and budgets continue to grow across all industries, there is a very valid argument for local governments to outsource some of those functions to private providers.

It's $3.50/address/month on Office 365 for government (just email, other stuff can run more).

If something doesn't work, the answer isn't to just shrug and break the law, it is to fix it. Especially when there are simple, inexpensive solutions staring you in the face.

Exactly, moobycow! This is such a simple, cheap solution. Even if JC had 1,000 email users, the annual costs would be $42,000, which is less than half the salary of an email administrator. Heck, even if the city had 5,000 employees that needed email addresses, the costs would be justified when you factor in hardware and software costs, as well as yearly licensing costs. This is a no brainer, really.

JPhurst wrote:
I maintain separate e-mail accounts for business and personal. I have my own law practice, as well as an of counsel relationship with a firm, and have separate accounts for both.

Sometimes these e-mails overlap. A colleague who I have dealt with at one firm will often send, out of habit, an e-mail to a matter I am handling through the other firm. I also sometimes get business e-mails to one of my personal accounts or personal e-mail to a work account.

The best course of action is to redirect any such conversations through the proper e-mail address. Does that always happen? Not always, but I try to.

I can understand that elected officials who have more than one account may have people send e-mails to an official non-business account. I have e-mailed councilpersons and my e-mail automatically populates the field with the personal or the campaign e-mail rather than the official e-mail, or vice versa. Again, I try to correct this but it doesn't always happen. A meticulous representative would redirect the e-mail, but not being meticulous does not necessarily equate to being corrupt.

If a constituent send a handwritten letter by snail mail and mailed it to an official's home address because they happen to know it, I don't think it would be improper if the official wrote a reply on their personal stationary and mailed it from home, rather than go over to the office and pen a response on official letterhead. Similarly, if I know someone's personal cell phone, I don't necessarily think it's wrong to call that number up if I need to reach that person even if it is for "official" business and they have a number at City Hall.

If an elected official, or city staffer, is regularly using personal accounts to circumvent laws that require open records, that's a problem. But given the way people use e-mail, one can't assume outright that any e-mail to/from the official's personal e-mail is being done to circumvent anything.

Lastly, although we have a broad Open Public Records Act, I do have to question as to whether any conversation between officials or between constituents and officials necessarily has to be disclosed as official business. Open and transparent government does not necessarily mean we have to be privy to every conversation that an official has on a matter. Records do need to be preserved, because even if something is not subject to OPRA or FOIA it can be potentially relevant in a law enforcement investigation. But I do not think City officials such as Robert Byrne are lacking in transparency or hiding anything when they express frustration that there's a group of people who, for sensationalist or vindictive purposes, make serial requests for city officials' e-mail records on a regular basis.

Given the proliferation of e-mail, and the ability to preserve it, maybe that's the new normal. Whether that's a good thing or not, I'm not sure.

moobycow wrote:
Quote:

bodhipooh wrote:
I don't buy the argument that "everybody does it" or the (seeming) implication that it is therefore OK.

But, as moobycow indicates, based on what is known of the city IT department (based on previous performance) I would guess that using a private email address is probably a safer bet.

Regardless, there is NO EXCUSE whatsoever to use that as a justification to allow government employees, especially higher ups, to use personal email addresses when conducting city business. Moving the city email service to a privately hosted solution (such as Microsoft Office 365, or Google Mail for Business) is SUPER easy and cost effective. Incredibly so, actually. As IT costs and budgets continue to grow across all industries, there is a very valid argument for local governments to outsource some of those functions to private providers.

It's $3.50/address/month on Office 365 for government (just email, other stuff can run more).

If something doesn't work, the answer isn't to just shrug and break the law, it is to fix it. Especially when there are simple, inexpensive solutions staring you in the face.

bodhipooh wrote:
I don't buy the argument that "everybody does it" or the (seeming) implication that it is therefore OK.

But, as moobycow indicates, based on what is known of the city IT department (based on previous performance) I would guess that using a private email address is probably a safer bet.

Regardless, there is NO EXCUSE whatsoever to use that as a justification to allow government employees, especially higher ups, to use personal email addresses when conducting city business. Moving the city email service to a privately hosted solution (such as Microsoft Office 365, or Google Mail for Business) is SUPER easy and cost effective. Incredibly so, actually. As IT costs and budgets continue to grow across all industries, there is a very valid argument for local governments to outsource some of those functions to private providers.

moobycow wrote:
Knowing what I know about the JC IT department I don't doubt that personal email is a better bet. Still, they could, and should, have forced an upgrade to Google or MS for hosted email.