On February 17, 2025, Dean’s Measure No. 4/2025 came into effect, requiring students of the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at Charles University (MFF CUNI) to exclusively use newly established email accounts within the Microsoft 365 system for communication with MFF staff.
This measure was introduced at MFF as a pilot part of a university-wide change, with similar measures expected to be adopted at other faculties. We disagree with this forced change and believe its implementation is misguided, both at MFF and potentially at other faculties.
Our objections are as follows:
The issue was not sufficiently discussed. There is no mention of this directive in the agenda of the MFF Academic Senate, meaning it was issued without giving students the opportunity to express their opinions.
We oppose deepening the university’s dependence on Microsoft as an external and foreign provider. We are not aware of any contract that guarantees the same service prices for the university in the future.
This concern is not unfounded, as changes in Microsoft’s conditions have already led to a drastic reduction in capacity for student accounts.
The use of M365 mailboxes is accompanied by a number of technical issues, such as:
Inability to log in using many students’ browsers.
Default settings in popular third-party email clients do not allow sending emails.
IMAP and SMTP services within M365 do not support standard username and password login or “application-specific passwords.” Instead, they require client programs to implement specific OAuth authentication with M365, which, among other things, requires registration with Microsoft.
As a result, the new email accounts are incompatible with many desktop email clients (e.g., Sylpheed, Scribe, etc.).
Microsoft’s mail servers are known for dropping a significant number of emails from smaller mail servers and sending even more directly to spam. This will hinder communication with individuals outside MFF and reduce the value of the new email account as a tool for all academic communication.
Outlook does not fully support PGP encryption, which prevents the use of a very popular and important method of electronic signatures.
The only officially supported desktop client is Outlook, which does not have a version for Linux. The web interface cannot display received emails without an internet connection, making it impossible to work with emails offline.
In a 2021 survey, over 36% of students expressed that, given the choice, they would not use the faculty email account. The introduction of this requirement thus goes against the explicit wishes of a significant portion of students.
We would like to note that in this survey, one of the advantages of the student M365 account was presented as 5 TB of SharePoint storage capacity, whereas now the capacity per account is only 40 GB.
M365 email accounts are not retained for former students or employees, meaning it will not be possible to contact them via email after their studies or employment end.
Many MFF CUNI instructors have already stated that they will not require their students to use the new student email accounts. At best, this is a measure with no real impact, “filed away,” or at worst, a tool for bureaucratic harassment of students by a minority of instructors.
Microsoft has faced numerous controversies in the past and present, particularly regarding privacy protection. One example is the ban on using Microsoft 365 in German schools due to concerns over insufficient data protection. As early as 2022, Czech Radio journalist Jan Cibulka highlighted the problematic aspects of using Microsoft and Google services in Czech education, emphasizing the potential risks to the privacy of pupils and students.
We demand:
In light of the above objections, we propose one of the following solutions:
Cancellation of the unified student email account project at CUNI and a return to communication via personal email addresses.
Removal of the requirement to create student email accounts in M365 CUNI, allowing each faculty to either choose a new system that suits its students or use one of the many existing email servers already in operation.
Transition of unified student email accounts to a server fully controlled by CUNI, allowing full interoperability with existing email clients.