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USC is changing its email service from a SUN system operated by ITS to having the mail hosted by Microsoft on their servers. We have until July 2014 to migrate the faculty and staff email accounts from the existing system to the new one. For information on the new system see this web site: http://www.usc.edu/its/office365/.
The following are some frequently asked questions about the migration.
Part of the reason is money since it costs a lot to operate the existing mail servers and USC's contract with Oracle for the SUN mail system is expiring next year. We're also told that some of the reason is due to problems with legal discovery motions. Apparently Microsoft has software to efficiently handle searches through archived mail, and USC does not.
The new system does not have any limits on how long mail is retained. The existing system automatically deletes mail more than one year old. This will not happen on Office365. Users will also have larger storage limit (25gb) for their mail.
Yes. You'll still be able to use "username@usc.edu", and should also be able to use "firstname.lastname@usc.edu", although that might require action on your part to set it up.
Any mail that you have on the current email.usc.edu system in folders and the INBOX will be migrated to the Office365 system when the migration is done by ITS. Mail that you have copied to your local system, or was received on the local system by using the POP delivery method is not affected.
Accessing your mail from a web browser will require using a different URL: http://www.usc.edu/office365 instead of the old email.usc.edu address. You'll also have to login with your full email address (username@usc.edu) instead of just with the username.
Users who access their mail using a mail client program (Thunderbird, Apple Mail, etc.) using the IMAP protocol will have to make changes to the settings for the account since the incoming and outgoing mail servers will be different.
We have found that the default spam and junk mail filters are overly aggressive and are likely to cause a number of non-spam messages to be stored in the "Junk E-Mail" mailbox. If you leave the filters on, make sure to check the Junk mailbox regularly to see if something went there that you actually want.
The other alternative is to turn the filtering off entirely. To do this click on the "Options" link in the upper right corner just below your name and then click on "See All Options" in the menu that drops down. Then select the "Block or Allow" tab from the left side. In the window that comes up, click on "Don't move e-mail to my Junk E-Mail folder" and then click the "Save" button in the lower right.
Apparently not. It appears that that either Office365 does not support the POP protocol, or that USC has asked them to not make it available. For whatever reason it does not show up as an available protocol when establishing connections.
If you want to have copies of your email on a local system so you can browse your email when you do not have an Internet connection, you should be able to do this with IMAP. Most IMAP mail clients have an option to keep a copy of all the mail on the local system.
Another solution to this is to have all your email forwarded from Office365 to some other mail system that does support POP, like Google's Gmail, and then have your email client program retrieve the messages from that mail system.
Office365 supports IMAP connections and it seems to work fine with mail clients like Thunderbird and Apple Mail. In your mail client you'll need to set up an account for accessing the mail from the Office365 servers usings IMAP with the appropriate settings.
To find the settings correct for your account, connect to your Office365 account from a web browswer as described above. Click on the little gear icon in the upper right corner next to your name and then click on "Options" in the menu that drops down. Then select the "account" tab from the left side and click on "my account" in the top portion of the center part of the page. Near the bottom of that page, click on a link that says "Settings for POP or IMAP access...". This will bring up a page similar to the one below but maybe with different server hostnames.
NOTE: If you have an existing IMAP account set up in your mail client that accesses the mail on email.usc.edu, be aware that there have been problems trying to change an existing mail client account to using Office365 by just changing the settings in the account configuration. It seems to work more reliably to set up a new account using the settings listed above. Once it has been confirmed to be working, the old email.usc.edu account can be deleted on the client.
Access to Outlook365 from Thunderbird works with these settings.
For incoming (IMAP) connection:
Access to Outlook365 from Apple Mail works with these settings. On the "Account Information" pane,
Apple Mail has an annoying feature in that if it can make a connection using Exchange it will do so and not offer the option of using IMAP. This makes it difficult to set up an IMAP account to a server (like Office365) that also offers Exchange connections. The following instructions describe how to work around this behavior and set up Apple Mail for an IMAP connection.
In Apple Mail, from the File menu select "Add Account...". In dialog box that comes up, fill in your name and your email address (username@usc.edu), but leave the password field blank. Click on Continue and after a bit it will put up a message in the box saying that it tried to connect to the Exchange server at that address but failed.
With the password field still blank, click on Continue again. The next dialog box will have pulldown menu at the top where you can select "IMAP". Then enter a name for this account like "USC Email", the IMAP server name (see above), your username (username@usc.edu), and your password.
Click on Continue and if it all works you'll be taken to a screen where you can enter the outgoing (SMTP) server information. Make sure "Use Authentication" is checked and enter the username and password.
Click on Continue and it will show a summary of the settings.
If everything looks correct click on Create to create the account.
Yes. As with the existing USC mail system you can set up forwarding and all mail will go there.
To set up forwarding, from the your main Office365 web page, click on the little gear icon in the upper right corner next to your name and then click on "Options" in the menu that drops down. Then select the "account" tab from the left side and click on "connected accounts" in the top portion of the center part of the page. This will bring up a page like the one shown below where you can fill in a forwarding address in the lower part of the page. Also be sure to unclick the checkbox that says "Keep a copy of forwarded messages in Outlook Web App". Finally click on the "start forwarding" button.
Yes. Your mail account on email.usc.edu, which may not have any mail stored in it and only does forwarding, still has to be migrated to the new server so you will continue to have a working ...@usc.edu address. Once it's on the new server you can continue to do forwarding. See the next question.
No. Mail forwarding settings are not migrated. Once the migration is complete you will have to connect to the new mail system with a web browser and set up forwarding as described above.
Autoreply messages can be set up by connecting to your Office365 account through a web browser at http://www.usc.edu/office365. Once connected, click on the little gear icon in the upper right corner next to your name and then click on "Options" in the menu that drops down. Then select the "organize email" tab from the left side and click on "automatic replies" in the top portion of the center part of the page. This will take you to a page similar to the one below where you can enter an autoreply messages and schedule it to be enabled and disabled.
