Many students enrolling at the University of Calgary will already have an email address that is known to friends, relatives and associates (i.e. hotmail, gmail, yahoo, etc). The University of Calgary also provides email addresses to members of the U of C community, which is idea for on-campus activities.
This article outlines the features of the university Email service available to students, and why you may want to register for a U of C email address for your on-campus correspondance. In addition to the primary support you will receive from the IT Support Centre, consider the following:
Email Integration with University of Calgary Message Services
Email from one ucalgary.ca address to another (i.e. blackboard and the campus mailing lists) are routed such that delivery is authenticated (not forged), reliable and traceable; correspondence with outside mail services such as hotmail is not.
Email Integration with University of Calgary Portal (myuofc)
From the portal, users are able to view and send email without having to login again or remember multiple username/password.
Large Email Message Limits
Maximum message size for sending or receiving is 50MB however you should check limits of the recipient. Please not that Webmail has a limit of handling a 10MB attachment.
Delivery confirmations
In the event that you may want confirmation that a message was sent or received (i.e. did a student receive notification, did instructor receive assignment).
Backup and Recovery Services
All U of C mailboxes are backed up daily. Messages that are deleted from a mailbox may be recovered if they were stored in the mailbox at the time of the daily backup. Messages are backed up for 30 days after deletion from mailbox.
Storage - 100MB for undergraduates
Storage may not look like the best reason for using U of C email, but most students are able to work within this limit. Additional storage space for keeping and sharing documents is also available on the webdisk service.
Mail Handling Features
You can auto-forward messages (to a PDA for example), set up notification auto-reply, and define rules for filing incoming mail messages (ie mailing lists).
Mailing Lists
Mailing Lists for Classes and Departments are synchronized with registration and within blackboard.
Use email clients other than webmail
IT uses IMAP protocol for fetching email. What it means is you can synchronize mail between your Blackberry and use other email clients like Mozilla Thunderbird, Apple Mail, Microsoft Outlook Express/Outlook.
Virus controls on incoming mail messages
Up-to-date virus McAfee DAT files are used to scan incoming mail attachments to clean messages with known viruses. Suspicious attachments (based on file types like exe, zip, bmp) are quarantined with a link for the recipient to retrieve if they beleive the message is legitimate.
Spam controls and whitelisting
Spam is blocked based on outside dynamic blacklists. Other email is delivered, but is scored by Spam Assassin and messages may be tagged (i.e. Spam?) if over threshold. The university does not want to block legitimate email and will whitelist addresses from problematic sites.