|
Email service phaseout on pangea
Last revision August 3, 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. One of the advantages of running our own email server on pangea was the ability to create special email addresses that represented a group or function rather than a specific individual. These addresses were not actual pangea accounts. They existed only as instructions in the email service configuration, called "aliases", so that mail received for one of these addresses would be forwarded to the email address of a real person or group of people. This forwarding could be updated over time as different people joined the group or assumed the function. There are also a very few actual pangea "group" accounts created so that multiple people could cooperatively manage email sent to one address that has a mailbox on pangea, such as the "dean" and "rfp" accounts. Not sure if the email address on pangea is a special alias or an actual group account? If it appears in the list showing accounts currently accessing email on pangea, then it is a true group email account, and you must switch to the group account phaseout instructions. If it does not appear in that list, it is a special alias, and you proceed with the instructions on this page. For example, the special pangea email address "managers" has always existed to allow people to send a message to whomever was currently managing the system. Or they could send to "lna" to contact the local network administrator, whomever that was. Or they could send to "gsac" in order to reach the current Graduate Student Advisory Committee members (as long as the incoming members each year notified the pangea manager to update the list!). Under the current schedule, these special alias addresses will stop functioning on December 30, 2008, when pangea stops responding in any way to email service requests. If you have been the recipient of one of these special alias addresses, what can you do? The School of Earth Sciences will continue to run some kind of server that can do email forwarding, but it will not be named "pangea". Instead, the special server name "@sesmail.stanford.edu" will be reserved just for this function. Network name servers will then point this name to whatever device is actually running the email forwarding service. This indirection will allow us to maintain special alias addresses of the form "something@sesmail.stanford.edu" indefinitely, regardless of which server systems we are actually running. The "sesmail.stanford.edu" service name is already active as of August 1, 2007. Any special alias that was defined for pangea can continue to be used by substituting "@sesmail.stanford.edu" instead of "@pangea.stanford.edu". Please note that "@sesmail" will not work for regular pangea accounts into the future - only for special alias addresses. Users of these special alias addresses should start now to notify correspondents and update web pages and printed materials where the address appears, to substitute "@sesmail.stanford.edu" for "@pangea.stanford.edu". Any mail sent to the special alias address with the server name "@pangea.stanford.edu" will continue to be forwarded only until December 30, 2008. After that, it will simply fail to be delivered, with an "address does not exist" error. Only mail sent to special alias addresses with the server name "@sesmail.stanford.edu" will function both now and after December 30, 2008. Groups that used one of these special alias addresses on pangea as a simple email list should consider switching to a full-featured mailing list on the ITS mailman service. Those lists are much easier to maintain over the long run, and have features to restrict access as desired.
|
