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PLEASE READ THIS MESSAGE! It contains important information
about the College of Engineering e-mail service.
We will be transitioning the EG-ADM mail services into the central mail
service known as UF Exchange on October 2nd. This message explains
changes between the existing mail service and UF Exchange. Another
message will be sent soon explaining how the transition will occur.
At the end of April we sent a message with subject “EG-ADM Exchange
Server Best Practices”. You can see an archive of this message on the
MIS website at
http://www.eng.ufl.edu/mis/articles.html?id=1046 . This
message explained that we were recommending a transition to UF
Exchange and outlined several things you should start doing to prepare
for our transition to this central mail service. Briefly, and as a reminder,
these things were:
Do not keep large ‘Deleted Items’ and ‘Junk E-Mail’ folders. We began enforcing the same retention periods for these mailboxes that UF Exchange has in order to prepare you for the way UF Exchange behaves. Do not let your ‘Inbox’ mail folder grow larger than 5000 messages and do not have any sub-folders under the ‘Inbox’. At the time this was mainly for performance reasons. However, it was also to prepare for the 1 year retention period for items in the ‘Inbox’ that a UF Exchange mailbox has. Do not let other special folders grow larger than 5000 items (these being the ‘Calendar’, ‘Contacts’, and ‘Sent Items’ folders). Again, this was for performance reasons. Additionally, the ‘Sent Items’ folder for a UF Exchange mailbox also has a 1 year retention period.
There are other aspects of UF Exchange that we need to make you aware
of before the transition so that you know what to expect from the service. For
further details concerning what is discussed below you can view all the UF
Exchange online documentation available at
http://www.mail.ufl.edu (particularly the “Service Specifications” page).
Change of Exchange Versions. UF Exchange uses Exchange
2007. We use Exchange 2003. You’ll have the additional features available
in the newer version of Exchange, including: an enhanced scheduling
assistant, customizable working hours, and an enhanced out of office
assistant. Additionally, there are several updates and enhancements to
the web mail interface known as Outlook Web Access.
Mailbox Quotas and Attachments. You are accustomed to not
having a mailbox quota. You still will NOT have a mailbox quota after the
transition to UF Exchange. In order to accomplish this however UF
Exchange does something special with attachments. To support the
‘no quota’ service level, UF Exchange has implemented an attachment
policy that moves attachments over 5k to ‘cheap’ storage. This removes
the attachment from mail stores and places them in a message archive.
Instead of the actual attachment being in your email you will see a link/URL
to the UF Exchange Archive in your email message. This is accomplished
using a program called Mail-Meter and you can read more about it at
http://www.mail.ufl.edu/mailmeter.shtml.
Spam. The way spam will be handled will change dramatically
and hopefully improve. UF Exchange leverages three different products to
protect against and stop the delivery of spam (ProofPoint, a Barracuda
Spam Firewall and Exchange Intelligent Message Filtering). Unfortunately
it’ll become harder for us to assist you in determining if messages are
being blocked due to spam rules (but don’t let that stop you from asking
us about it). The UF Exchange website has some good documentation
regarding ‘Managing Spam’ and the ‘Barracuda Spam Settings & Scoring’.
Additionally, we’ll be sending more information to you to help you prepare
for this change.
Mobile Devices and Mail. If you check your email on any kind
of mobile device (particularly smartphones), a PIN will be required. After
migration your device will prompt you to enter a 4-digit PIN (or security
password). The PIN will be required to be re-entered after any 15 minute
period of inactivity.
Finally, If you are a faculty or staff member of a unit outside of
Engineering Administration and have an @eng.ufl.edu email address
we have been in contact with your departmental IT staff to determine
what will happen with your mailbox. Mailboxes within UF Exchange
incur a yearly $24 charge. This is a charge that your unit will have to
pay if your mailbox is transitioned into UF Exchange along with EG-ADM.
Your IT staff may have already discussed this with you. In some
instances, units are choosing to not pay the fee and transition the
mailbox to some other service.
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