Email service phaseout on pangea

Instructions for people receiving email on pangea

Last revision August 20, 2007

As described in news items, email service will end on pangea by November 1, 2007, and email forwarding will end on June 30, 2008.

About 375 people with active pangea accounts are receiving email directly on pangea (some of them are also forwarding a copy to an outside email address). These people need to take immediate action to avoid disruption of email service. If you are in this group and do nothing, starting November 1, 2007, email sent to your pangea account will be refused (and lost), and access to your old stored email on pangea will cease.

Not sure if you are actually receiving email on pangea? Check the list showing accounts currently accessing email on pangea. This list also shows which email access methods you are using; you need that information to properly transfer old messages and reconfigure your email program to use a new account.

Faculty and staff: our CRC desktop support consultants can assist you to perform this switch, generally all in a single visit to your office. Make sure your portable computers are also available to be reconfigured. The CRC consultant can provide you directions to reconfigure your home computer.

You must be present while a CRC consultant works to switch your email. He/she will have questions for you, and your passwords on pangea and the new email account must be entered at various times in the process.

Enter your request for CRC help to migrate your email at the web site:

http://helpsu.stanford.edu

In your request, state that you are migrating your email from our School server and need in-person help from either Alex Tayts or Becky Fenton. The general help desk staff do not understand all the steps needed to migrate from pangea. We have already had one case where they disabled someone's email with incorrect instructions over the phone. Insist on in-person help from Alex or Becky only!

Faculty and staff can switch their email themselves following the outline and instructions below, but if they prefer CRC help, they should enter their request as soon as they are ready to make the move. The consultants will be especially busy with beginning of quarter work from about September 15 to October 15, so they would like to complete as many email account transfers as possible before then.

Students: we do not have sufficient resources to provide a CRC consultant to help all of you. You are expected to follow the outline and instructions below to switch your email account. If you get completely stuck, and have read and followed the instructions, then enter a HelpSU request for assistance.

Here is an overview of the steps that are needed to switch your email account from pangea to another server. Follow the links in each step to more detailed instructions. You are strongly urged to read all the instructions, and the detailed pages that apply to you, before starting the process.

1. Decide what email account you will use instead of pangea. It can be your @stanford.edu account, or an outside service such as yahoo or gmail. It is easiest to switch to your @stanford.edu account; tools are available to transparently transfer any saved email from pangea to that account.

   One strategy is to make your @stanford.edu account your main email server, to which pangea mail will forward, but to setup a separate personal account on an outside service that you can keep even if you leave Stanford. Then tell personal correspondents and web accounts to use this new personal email address. Students can create a permanent personal email account with the Stanford Alumni Association as soon as they begin their studies - no need to wait until you graduate!

2. Update your contact information in the School of Earth Sciences personnel directory (click on the login link in the upper right to edit your entry) and the Stanford Directory so people can find your new email address.

   If you are active at Stanford, people will expect to reach you with an @stanford.edu email address. Whether you decide to use that as your main email account, or to forward it to some other email account, make an email alias in the Stanford Directory in the format Firstname.Lastname@stanford.edu. This is often easier for others to remember than your actual SUNet ID.

3. Cleanup your pangea email INBOX and saved folders! Many people leave thousands of old messages in their INBOX, sometimes without even knowing it because their email client is only showing the new messages each time it connects to pangea. Similarly, many people have created multiple folders of saved email on pangea using IMAP clients, webmail or pine. Some of these may be years old and no longer relevant.

   Before you switch your email client to get email elsewhere, be sure to clean up your INBOX and delete unneeded saved mail folders, or turn them into local folders on your own computer.

4. Stop or redirect email forwarding from other accounts to pangea. In particular, remove any forwarding to pangea from your @stanford.edu email address in the Stanford Directory.

STOP!
Before you proceed, make sure your @stanford.edu account or other new account
you plan to use is not forwarding to your pangea account! Otherwise, you will
create an endless forwarding loop that will eat all your email.

5. Enable forwarding from your pangea address to your new email account using the email management module of the pangea account maintenance web server. Once you do this, you cannot go back to receiving email on pangea.

   Forwarding will continue until July 1, 2008, unless you stop it earlier (see below). Any message flagged by the pangea spam checker as possible spam will not be forwarded.

6. Think about the correct order to update multiple computers using POP or IMAP. This step does not apply to any computer where you only use webmail or pine, because those programs do not store email messages or configuration on the local computers.

   Make sure you do the next two steps (transfer old email and reconfigure your email program) in the right order if you have multiple computers where you read email using POP or IMAP, in order to avoid lost or duplicate mail:

   • If you have a single main computer where you read and manage your email, and only use other computers (such as a laptop or home computer) to occasionally check new messages, then ignore the secondary computers for now, and proceed with message transfer and reconfiguration from your primary computer. Then reconfigure your secondary systems later.
   • If you are trying to maintain synchronized copies of all your email on multiple computers, then first work on the secondary computers (such as a laptop or home computer). Open your email client on those secondary computers and "check mail", so they update themselves with any remaining messages on pangea, and then reconfigure them to connect to your new email account. Work on your main computer last. Update it with remaining messages, use it to transfer saved messages from pangea to your new account, and then reconfigure it to connect to your new email account.
7. Transfer any messages still stored on your pangea account to your own computer or your new account. There may be messages still in your INBOX or in saved email folders on pangea. Once email service ends on pangea on November 1, these remaining messages will no longer be accessible!

   Avoid problems with duplicate messages or full mailbox quotas by cleaning up (deleting) as many old messages or saved mail folders as you can, before you try to transfer any to your new account.

   If you are using POP or IMAP email clients, such as Eudora, Outlook, Mac OS Mail, or Thunderbird, it is least troublesome to simply download all messages to your local computer, not transfer them from pangea to the new server. Of course, there may be some messages or folders that you need to access from multiple computers. Plan to download the rest and just transfer those essential messages and folders to your new account.

   If you use webmail and pine exclusively, your email is never stored on a "local computer", but always on the server (pangea), so you must transfer it to your new email account or it will be lost. Clean up first to reduce the number of messages that you need to transfer!

   A simple tool has been created to transfer saved email from pangea to your @stanford.edu account. Check the transferring email web page for instructions to use this tool or to get suggestions how to transfer your saved pangea email to other non-Stanford email accounts.

8. Change the configuration settings on your email program to connect to your new account instead of pangea. Don't forget to check the settings on your laptop, home computer, pda, etc. You need to determine if you are using POP or IMAP clients to correctly reconfigure. The list of accounts currently accessing email on pangea will show you which access methods you are using.
   If switching a POP or IMAP client program to your @stanford.edu account, follow these ITS instructions. These instructions may also help if you are switching to an outside email account. If using an outside email account, you must follow the ITS instructions for setting an SMTP server. You cannot connect to an outside provider's SMTP server from the Stanford network.

   If you are using webmail exclusively, you simply switch to a new webmail address - no configuration necessary. For your @stanford.edu account, use http://webmail.stanford.edu/.

   If you are using pine on pangea, and you switch to your @stanford.edu account, you can continue to use pine by logging into the elaine or saga computers to run it, but you must follow special instructions to configure it to act like an IMAP client in order to access your transferred email.

9. Check the spam deletion settings for your new account. Many people used the pangea email management module to automatically delete messages classified as "spam" so they were never delivered to your INBOX. Make sure your new account is doing the same! For your @stanford.edu account, use the ITS Spam Deletion Tool.
10. Notify everyone using your pangea address to start using your new address. You have a little less than a year to complete this step. Starting July 1, 2008, email from your pangea address will no longer be forwarded. Follow this link for some ideas to help you manage this address updating.
11. You can change your pangea email forwarding at any time to switch to another account, until forwarding ends on June 30, 2008. You cannot stop forwarding and go back to using a pangea account once you have made the switch. Or, you can disable forwarding altogether if all your correspondents have switched to your new address. This will keep random "spam" messages from being forwarded (messages flagged by the pangea spam checker will not be forwarded in any case).

    To change forwarding, use the email management module of the pangea account maintenance web server.

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