Information Services

Remember:

After Friday October 1, you will no longer be able to access to the old email system – GroupWise or TigerMail.

If you wish to keep any of your emails that are currently in GroupWise, you must copy them to your Google Apps account before that date!

For detailed instructions, visit the Google Apps support site at https://sites.google.com/a/depauw.edu/depauw-google-apps/.

How to get help copying your old email:

For the past few weeks, Information Services staff has been offering open lab times for those who would like assistance with completing the migration to Google Apps.

The final open lab session is on Thursday September 30, 1:00-4:00pm in the Roy O West Computer Lab, or you can contact the Help Desk at 765-658-4294 to arrange for personal assistance.

From Carol L. Smith, CIO

As planned, next week we will begin the campus move from GroupWise email and calendar to Google Apps for Education. On March 1, everyone will receive an email message from the HelpDesk providing login information to their DePauw Google Apps account, instructions about how to manage their own transition to the new system, and where to get help. In the meantime, I encourage you to review the following important information about the project.

If you have any questions about the Google Apps rollout (or any other IT-related projects), please don’t hesitate to contact me at clsmith@depauw.edu.

Thanks in advance for your efforts in helping us all make this transition. We are excited about this upgrade for the campus and look forward to the new possibilities that it will bring to supporting communication and collaboration in all aspects of our campus activities.

Cheers,

–Carol.

Key points in the following include:

1. Will my email address be the same in Google Apps?
2. Developing your personal transition strategy
3. The Google Apps Transition Timeline
4. What about special accounts (e.g., basketweaving@depauw.edu)? Will they be ready on March 1?

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From a February 16 article published in The DePauw:

“Students and faculty alike who have been growing frustrated with Novell Tigermail should soon be able to breathe a sigh of relief.  The university’s current e-mail client will be replaced with Google Apps for Education. The shift will not require anyone to change their e-mail addresses.“

Read the full article . . .

From Carol L. Smith, CIO

Beginning this spring and continuing through this summer, DePauw University will transition from Novell GroupWise to Google Apps for Education.

Last December, Information Services recommended moving DePauw’s email and calendaring system from GroupWise/Tigermail to Google Apps for Education.  This recommendation came as a result of a yearlong study to identify the best next steps in improving our email and calendaring system. After careful consideration and approval by the President’s Cabinet, as well as expressed support by the Academic Technology Advisory Committee (ATAC), we have decided to move forward with this transition.

Google Apps for Education is a free suite of hosted communication and collaboration applications designed for colleges and universities, which includes email, calendaring and several integrated collaboration tools (Google Docs, Sites, voice and video chat). Adopting Google Apps as our campus email will enable us to provide rich, robust and flexible email and personal calendaring, while reducing overall costs for providing these services.

Google Apps Transition Timeline (more…)

From Carol L. Smith, CIO

DePauw’s current email system, Novell GroupWise and TigerMail, needs upgraded. After having spent the past year studying viable options, Information Services is recommending that DePauw move to Google Apps for Education, a free suite of hosted communication and collaboration applications designed for schools and universities.

A number of colleges and universities have already moved their email operations over the past two years to Google Apps with great success, and we believe that adopting it as our system will enable DePauw to provide rich, robust email and personal calendaring, while reducing overall costs for providing these services.

A printable document spelling out the proposed project in detail is available HERE.

If you are interested in exploring more about Google, you can find lots of information at Google Apps for Education.

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As the semester draws to a close, it’s more than likely that your email inbox is piling up with more information and emails than you can handle. However, not more than ever is the time when email maintenance is needed. An important thing to remember about DePauw’s email network is that the more email in the system, the slower the system will run. Being proactive with managing your inbox can help negate the slowness you may experience with Novell. Here are a few easy ways to keep your inbox under control.

Keep your Inbox clear. Your email will work faster if the Inbox has fewer messages in it. To maintain your inbox, it’s a good idea to set aside time in the day to deal with your email messages. If a message can be dealt with in a few minutes, do it and get it out of your inbox. You can also use other folders to organize messages. Keeping your email inbox clear will make it easier for you to find messages and you will likely be less overwhelmed about the amount of pending email that needs attention.

Empty the trash and sent items folders regularly. It’s not enough to just delete your emails because all items in your trash still take up the 50 MB of space that students receive. The system removes items older than 15 days old from trash automatically, but you can empty it more often if you have a lot of email that you delete. Sent items are easy to overlook, but they also take up space and are not as necessary to hold onto.

Unsubscribe to list services that you don’t use. It may have seemed like a good idea at the time to offer up your email address to get that extra discount at Barnes and Noble, but it’s likely that you probably don’t need to get weekly reminders anymore. It’s likely that everyone has subscribed to something at one point or another, but at some point, the messages have stopped being read and are now just deleted automatically. Take the time to read the message and follow the directions to unsubscribe from the list service. Cutting out these messages will drastically decrease the amount of weekly email you have coming through your inbox.

Use a different email service. Obviously your Tigermail account is necessary to function as a DePauw student, but it’s also a good idea to create an off-site email account (GMAIL, YAHOO, HOTMAIL, etc.) for personal or non-DePauw email. This will simplify your DePauw email box and help you separate your personal messages from your professional work messages.

Archive old messages. While there will be email that you will want to store, it’s likely that you do not need to keep this email in your inbox. You can help keep your inbox under the quota limit by archiving older messages.  To leran how to archive mail messages, follow the instructions here.

Contributed by Michael Gough, Instructional Technologist and Coordinator of START and Bernie Timberman, Senior Network and Systems Administrator

Spam is becoming more prevalent in the cyber community every day. Many viruses and identity thieves rely upon spam email to spread their schemes. Therefore, to prevent many viruses and possible spyware infections, DePauw has invested in two robust spam filters. These filters work very well, especially given the volume of emails that come into DePauw. However, it is not perfect and users should still scan attachments for viruses and spyware. Also, be careful when clicking on links in emails; many spammers use these links to take you to Web sites that can steal information from your computer.

The following offers a perspective of how much of our email really is spam, helps you understand how this system works, and give you an idea of how your contributions can assist our spam filter system.

DePauw uses two Barracuda Model 400 spam filters to trap spam, viruses, and Denial of Service attacks. Denial of Service attacks are email attacks that are designed to overwhelm an email server and deny its functionality for its users. Our filters are configured to update their spam and virus definitions hourly. This information is combined with known spam messages identified by the HelpDesk. Below is a graph from one of the filter’s recent performances.

Notice how only a very small fraction of the total is allowed to be delivered to the recipients’ email boxes. The spam filters actually have a 12 step defense layer and a load balancer equalizes the work between the two filters so that one of them is not overwhelmed with too much volume.

The last step (Spam Scoring) is modified daily by the DePauw community. We input spam messages that are received by the HelpDesk from users to strengthen the spam filtering. Therefore, you can help our filters become more efficient by sending any spam that you recieve to the HelpDesk. This will help all computer users prevent viruses and cybercrime on DePauw’s campus.

Contributed by Dan Pfeifer, Chief Technology Officer
and Courtney Hime, ITAP Communications Consultant

Often on days when faculty, staff, and students feel e-mail is running behind, it is forgotten how much spam the University sifts through. Here are some monthly, daily, and hourly statistics about the amount of spam received by the Network Services Group.