Last revision August 16, 2007
| The Reason | The Schedule | What Do I Do Now? |
For 24 years, the School of Earth Sciences has maintained its own email servers, using the name "pangea.stanford.edu" since 1990. This proud tradition began when Earth Sciences was one of the first units on campus to get connected to the Internet and we had to provide all services for ourselves.
Email is now a commodity; reliable service is readily available at the central campus level from ITS and from outside providers.
At the School level, we need to stop duplicating freely available services such as email in order to save limited staff time and finances for more important IT services, such as enhanced web services and expanded high-speed central file storage and backup. In addition, Stanford's central IT is planning email improvements, such as email and calendar integration, that we simply will not be able to duplicate on pangea.
It is time to phase out email services on pangea. Please note that we are only planning to stop email services on pangea. Other services accessed with your pangea account will continue, such as file storage, web hosting, and poster printing.
New pangea accounts created after July 11, 2007 have no email service at all. Pangea will simply "return to sender" any email sent to one of those new accounts.
Local email service for existing accounts on pangea will end by November 1, 2007. This means that your email can no longer be delivered to pangea, and you can no longer connect to pangea to read or download it, after that date. You must switch to your @stanford.edu email address or an outside address (such as yahoo or gmail) before November 1.
Pangea will run an email forwarding service until July 1, 2008. When you switch to a new email account, you can enable forwarding from your old pangea account. This way, you will have time to contact all your correspondents, mailing lists, web accounts, etc., and get them to use your new email address.
On July 1, 2008, email forwarding from pangea will cease. Emails sent to pangea will be returned to the sender with a message to find the person's current information in the Stanford Directory.
On December 31, 2008, even this "return to sender" function will end. Pangea will stop responding in any way to requests to accept email. Attempts to send email to pangea addresses after that date will fail immediately with an "address does not exist" error.
Various groups of people are affected differently by this change. People with active pangea accounts have to either switch their email, or if they have already switched, deal with updating correspondents before forwarding ends. Some people in the School do not use pangea accounts, but receive email sent to special email aliases on pangea; they need to update those.
For any group definition below that applies to you, simply follow the link to get detailed instructions on what to do. People who receive their email on pangea need to take immediate action. Others still have to deal with forwarding issues within the next year. If you are not sure whether you receive email on pangea, check the list showing accounts currently accessing email on pangea.
Send your questions, concerns, and comments about this process to the pangea system manager.