Email Upgrade Jan. 17-19, 2004
Starting early Saturday morning, January 17, ITSS will begin moving customers from the old email system to the new one. The new email systems is designed to remove the major bottleneck that has been providing slow response time for email service during last semester. This is a very large project and a very large move. More than 23,000 inboxes have to be moved.
IMPORTANT POINTS
- There will be some extended email outages during the January 17-19 weekend. Access to email will be blocked during the outage.
- Those using Pine on Unix systems will experience some minor changes in the interface as we adjust Pine to work with the new email system.
- Those using Elm or other non-IMAP or non-POP email readers will have to make some choices. This is only a small minority of our customers.
See below for details on each of these items.
PLANNED EMAIL OUTAGES
In order to move the email inbox areas and ensure consistency we will take the entire email system down for several hours at a time. Expect email outages during these time frames:
- Saturday, January 17, 7 AM to 11 AM
- Sunday, January 18, 7 AM to 11 AM
- Monday, January 19, 7 AM to 11 AM
We are hopeful that we will need less time than this to make all the moves, but we are erring on the conservative side with the time estimates above.
PINE EMAIL USERS
If you are currently using Mulberry, Netscape, Outlook, PC-Pine or other email programs that use either IMAP or POP protocols, you may ignore this section.
Pine programs on ITSS Unix systems must be converted to use IMAP. This will enable them to work with our new email system. Those using Pine on ub, bulldog, or some other Unix system that ITSS administered will have their Pine preferences modified for them by ITSS. This will result in some minor interface changes. For example, you will now be required to log in when using Pine on a Unix system.
PC-Pine readers were converted to using IMAP some time ago, so there will be no change necessary for these.
ELM AND OTHER NON-IMAP or NON-POP EMAIL USER
If you are currently using Mulberry, Netscape, Outlook, PC-Pine, Pine, or other email programs that use either IMAP or POP protocols, you may ignore this section.
Elm and other non-IMAP or non-POP email readers will not work with our new email system. Users of these products will either have to convert to a more modern product or alert us to leave you on the old email system. The old email system will not support IMAP, POP, or webmail.
Please let us know by sending email to:
email-upgrade@d.umn.edu
if you wish to continue to read email on the old email system. If you
let us know before we move your email box this weekend, that will
prevent us from having to move your box back to the old system after
the conversion.
Staying on the old email system is a solution for this spring 2004 semester only. During this semester we will offer some other options and work with those customers as needed.
ASSISTANCE
As with any project of this magnitude, there may be some issues to deal with during the first week of the semester. Our staff will be working hard to keep problems to a minimum. Please keep our Help Desk (8847, helpdesk@d.umn.edu) informed if you have any problems with your email.
Thanks in advance for your patience and understanding.