E-mail

E-mail is a popular method of communication at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Our e-mail systems are powered by Microsoft Exchange 2003. E-mail is sent by faculty, staff, and students to conduct official business, to facilitate learning and to correspond informally.

Appropriate use of e-mail resources

The HWS Acceptable Use Policy is currently being reviewed and updated with constituents across the institution. If you have any questions, issues, or concerns regarding the Acceptable Use Policy, please contact the Support Center. The Support Center can be reached by phone at ext. 4357 or by e-mail at helpdesk@hws.edu.

E-mail addresses

Each HWS network user has an account login name, a primary e-mail address, and possibly an e-mail alias. The network account login name is used to access the HWS network and its services. A primary e-mail address is a user’s official e-mail address and is the main identifier in the College’s e-mail system. An e-mail alias is an additional identifier associated with a user account and supplements their primary e-mail address.

Listed below are explanations of how e-mail addresses are created:

Students — the official (primary) e-mail address format for students is firstname.lastname@hws.edu. For example, for a student named Margaret Jane Smith, her e-mail address would be Margaret.Smith@hws.edu. In the instance of duplicate names, a number is added to the last name to resolve the match. Therefore, if there were already a student named Margaret Smith enrolled at HWS, the second Margaret Smith e-mail address would be Margaret.Smith1@hws.edu.

Messages sent by students from the HWS mail system will show the firstname.lastname@hws.edu e-mail address as the “FROM” address when received by others.

In addition to the primary e-mail address, each student also has an e-mail alias associated with his or her network account in the format of networkaccount@hws.edu. So if Margaret Smith’s network account was MS1234, her e-mail alias would be MS1234@hws.edu. Mail can be sent to this address, but the address is not published to provide a degree of security since that address includes the user’s network login name.

Faculty, staff, and others — the official e-mail address format for faculty, staff and others is lastname@hws.edu. For example, a faculty member named Michael John Smith's e-mail address would be smith@hws.edu. Duplicate accounts are resolved by using portions of the first name. Therefore, if there was another faculty member with the last name of Smith, Michael’s e-mail address would be MSmith@hws.edu.

Requests for e-mail aliases can be made to the help desk (helpdesk@hws.edu) and will be granted if deemed an appropriate use of the namespace.

E-mail quota

Electronic mailboxes provide an easy way to exchange messages, manage appointments, and transfer files and pictures. Text messages are usually very small in size and you can literally store thousands in your mailbox. However, when e-mail messages contain attachments, i.e., documents, spreadsheets, presentations, pictures, media, etc., they often consume a large amount of storage space.

Currently, students, faculty and staff are allotted 500 MB of mail storage space. Users are encouraged to check their mail storage periodically to avoid mail delivery problems. Both the Webmail interface and Outlook provide utilities that summarize disk usage.

The following table describes action taken by the mail system when your mailbox space begins to fill up:

When a mailbox is filling up, users can review their mailbox and determine which folders and/or messages are taking up the most storage space. All folders, including the Deleted Items folder, are allocated against users’ mailbox quota. Often, the easiest action to take is to empty the Deleted Items folder. Users may also conserve space by moving or deleting messages with large attachments and old Inbox and Sent items that are no longer needed.

If your mailbox is closed because you exceeded your quota, you will not be able to send or receive mail from or to your HWS mailbox. Remember, that you are responsible for taking the appropriate actions to ensure your mailbox is in good working order to receive messages.

Please contact the help desk (at helpdesk@hws.edu) if you need assistance with managing and archiving the contents of your mailbox.

Spam and spam policy

As a user of e-mail and a member of the Internet community, your e-mail identity is probably known by spammers and virus writers. However, if you would like to minimize the amount of unwanted messages you can do so by:

• not publicizing your e-mail address on Web sites,
• not responding to unsolicited e-mail,
• being selective to the number of listservs that you subscribe, and
• using mail filters to automatically delete unwanted messages
• using out of office rules to control who gets out of office reply messages from you when you’re not in the office.
• using the anti-spam program at http://antispam.hws.edu/

Sending Large or Confidential Files

If a file is too large to be sent through Outlook, or contains confidential information, use the Accellion Courier File Transfer System. The Accellion Large File Transfer Protocol must be used to send e-mail attachment(s) larger than 10MB. Total attachments size cannot exceed a total of 2GB. File recipients receive a message stating there is a file attachment to download, and a link to the file. File recipients must log in to the system to retrieve the attachment.

Getting your e-mail

The easiest way to access e-mail is to visit the Webmail site at https://webmail.hws.edu. No configuration is needed to send and read e-mail in a secure fashion. All you need to know is your HWS network user name and password to enter the site. All students are encouraged to use Web access, as methods requiring configuration are not supported.

Mail forwarding

The Colleges prohibit mail forwarding for students and discourage it for all others. This is done so we can easily identify members of the HWS community and help ensure mail delivery. More specifically we do so because:

1. it was often hard to identify students and others with names such as “sillygrl8@aol.com” and “nascarules@hotmail.com” when trying to determine who are legitimate mail senders;
2. instructors have trouble sending files to other mail delivery systems that may not have sufficient mailbox quotas to receive messages and received bounce backs; and
3. the IT department was charged to ensure mail delivery to the best of their ability. Therefore, keeping mail on campus was one way we can identify problems and take the appropriate action.

Faculty members can request mail forwarding by sending a message to the help desk (helpdesk@hws.edu).

Automatic replies (out of office messages)

The out-of-office reply is available in Outlook & Entourage under the Tools menu, or in Webmail under Shortcuts then Options.

Note that the out-of-office reply will go out to all senders who send you an e-mail while it is enabled. This has been known to significantly increase the receipt of spam (unsolicited commercial e-mail).

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact the help desk at ext. HELP (or helpdesk@hws.edu).