Letters
Please send your letters to Ruth Taylor at the.reporter@leeds.ac.uk or send them by post to: The Reporter, Employee communications team, Room 12.72, E C Stoner Building.
All letters will be published at the editor's discretion. Please provide your full name, honorifics, and the name of your department or school. We will not as a rule publish anonymous letters (unless a name is supplied to the editor), 'round robin' letters, letters that have been published elsewhere, or letters that have also been sent to University colleagues for action. Letters may be cut (for space) and we will indicate when this has happened. If writers have asked questions, we will attempt to answer them. We may add an editor's note to correct any factual errors.
VARSITY VINTAGE
Level 10 in the E C Stoner Building is one of the longest corridors in Europe. It is also the longest greenhouse, and the most neglected one. Since it faces south, why not plant it with grape vines? Sap has no difficulty rising well above level 10 in the trees outside, so it will rise into the grapes also.
I will present the vines starting with a Vitis vinifera Black Hamburg (Frankenthaler). Since it is the Red Route, it should be a vin rouge. We will need to form a society, ‘The Vintners of Level 10’, to tend them and help me dig holes in the concrete to plant them.
When there is a vintage year, I shall expect a bottle addressed to Heaven.
Maurice King
Honorary research fellow
Department of Obstetrics
m.h.king@leeds.ac.uk
EMAILS ON THE MOVE
If you use a mobile device to send email, or use a laptop connected to a public wireless network, there is no guarantee that ISS will relay your email, even if it is from your leeds.ac.uk address to another leeds.ac.uk address.
Why? Because ISS apply spam protection software that will not always recognise such internal emails as legitimate.
If a message you send from a laptop, BlackBerry or iPhone is quarantined, you get no warning – you need to rely on your colleague or student checking their quarantined messages (but who doesn’t just delete those?). I know this has happened to at least 10 emails to or from me in the last year, some of them, regrettably, rather urgent and important.
I would urge ISS to find a manner of permitting staff and students to send messages to and from one another on all platforms. This is now quite firmly the 21st century. It would be best if the University could reliably support the mobile technologies that will let us do our work more efficiently and achieve our strategic objectives in more diverse and creative ways.
Dr Mark Taylor-Batty
School of English
Reply: Although superficially a mobile device seems to be sending from one Leeds address to another, the actual message passes through many different networks before it reaches our own network and the industry standard anti-spam software that we use.
Hence, emails from mobiles or public wireless networks appear to our (or any organisation’s) network as ‘foreign’ and we need to check them for spam. Spam can mimic ‘leeds.ac.uk’ addresses so that is not a unique identifier.
Hundreds of our staff and students use these devices safely and securely without losing email. Please see our guide at http://iss.leeds. ac.uk under Getting Help > Email, or contact the ISS helpdesk for personal advice, phone ext. 33333.
Colin Coghill
Director of Information Systems Services (ISS)
