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DICE News 2002-06 #1 General: 1) Changes to staff email (Staff) Please make sure you read the items in the 'General' category and then in any other categories as seems appropriate. For safety, that means read everything :-) These postings are kept as short as practical. (A copy of this posting will be available under http://www.dice.informatics.ed.ac.uk/deploy/#deploy_news) Items are usually also covered in the DICE FAQ at http://www.dice.informatics.ed.ac.uk/faq Jeremy Olsen ---------------------------------------------------------------- 1) Changes affecting email (Staff) There will be a couple of major changes happening that will affect staff email. The first affects *how* you get your email and the second affects *where* you get your email. This message explains the principles of what will happen. Further details will be given soon about how it will be implemented. How you get your email ---------------------- Users on existing machines (UNIX, Mac and Windows) use a variety of mail readers to read their email . These actually access the email in different ways, as a simple file, or using the POP or IMAP mail protocols. Under the new inf domain there will be mailboxes for everyone on the new inf mail server. IMAP will be the *only* method available to access this mailbox . (IMAP is already the only mail collection option for the EUCS staff and student mail services, staffmail and SMS) Newer mail readers (eg Netscape, pine, exmh, Eudora, vm, dtmail) support the IMAP protocol and they are already used by the majority of users. Consequently this change will have no obvious impact, apart from a minor configuration change for their chosen email client. However, older email programs (eg, ream, mail, rmail) do not support IMAP directly so these users will need to make some changes. This will be a good opportunity to switch to using a newer mail reader that will give additional benefits such as easy handling of MIME-encoded mail. One additional facility that the new inf mail server will offer is a web-based interface (called IMP, but not to be confused with IMAP). This will allow you to securely read your inf email from anywhere that you can use a browser. Some users may in fact choose to switch to it as their usual means of accessing email although there is no obligation to. The officially supported mailers will be Netscape, Pine and the IMP browser interface. Other mailers can be configured to use IMAP and further information will be provided on how to do this. Where you get your email ------------------------ At the moment email addressed to existing cogsci, dcs and dai users is usually delivered into a mailbox on a legacy server. As soon as DICE is available every user will have an inf account and therefore an *additional* mailbox on the inf server. This will be the case even if you don't get a new DICE machine on your desk. Having two mailboxes would inevitably lead to some confusion. In order to avoid this, we intend to switch off delivery of mail into old legacy mailboxes. Instead mail will be forwarded to the user's account on the inf server to be delivered into a user's mailbox there. All IMAP-compatible mail readers, on DICE and legacy machines, can then be set to read mail from the inf server. NB: old email *addresses* (eg, freda@cogsci) will still continue to work, we just won't deliver the mail into old mailboxes. We will allow a period between the new inf accounts being available and making the changeover although we will try to keep it relatively short (some weeks). Once the changeover has happened all official references to email addresses should use the inf one in preference to old legacy ones. The database will be configured to only generate inf domain addresses.
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