Email transition

Prior to this transition, each functional cluster of machines (eg, faculty, research, graduate, undergraduate, etc) provided mail services to its own set of users so it was possible for users with accounts on more than one cluster to have more than one mail address (and necessary for the user to read mail in more than one place or set up forwarding to a central location).

The decision to centralize our mail services came about for several reasons:

• Best mail service available within the department.
  Mail has come a long way in recent years. From a medium for exchanging simple text messages between hosts, it has evolved to include web pages, pictures, sound and video with the messages now stored in centralized servers accessible via protocols such as POP and IMAP. While the mail clients and servers running on our Solaris machines were capable of handling such mail, they were typically outdated and buggy compared with the abilities of the server on dragon and clients under Linux and on users' personal machines. Mail quotas are much larger on dragon too.
• Simplicity from the user's point of view.
  We found that many users were unaware of some accounts they had and were as a result not seeing mail sent to them on those clusters. All mail will now be routed to the new server.
• Spam and virus prevention.
  dragon employs real-time blacklisting, virus blocking, and spam tagging in order to reduce the impact of these messages on our users. While we did our best to route most of the mail through dragon, there were some routes around this server which spammers and viruses were able to find and use to circumvent our protective measures. Putting all mail on dragon eliminates these bypasses.
• Ease of administration.
  It's just easier to use a single built-to-be-scaled commercial mail server than to coordinate mail servers across a number of clusters with different administrators, policies, etc.

We began warning people of the impending transition May 1. Discussion of the details and instructions on what to do were posted on the web. Several mass mailings were sent out. Yet a number of people eligible for a dragon mail account have not created one.

There are two ways we can try to get in touch with our users via email. user@cs.rutgers.edu will work if the user has an email account on dragon; user@rutgers.edu will work if the user has a working email address registered in the Rutgers Online Directory.

Links

• CS Email Transition
  The warning/discussion of the impending transition.
• dragon.rutgers.edu
  The webmail interface -- and place you go to create a dragon account.
• Rutgers Online Directory
  Where you should go to register an email address for forwarding mail sent to you @rutgers.edu. Follow the "Changes and Corrections" link to update your registered email address. Persons who are both students and employees should make sure the right email address is registered in both places.
• RULink
  Although not directly related to the email transition, you can get personalized forwarding like john.smith@rutgers.edu at this site. Scroll down to the Mail discussion to learn how to set this up.