It's Done

All the planned steps for moving the mail server to webmail.cs.okstate.edu (see previous post) have been performed, so effective immediately, CSA is no longer the mail server (or the web server, since a week or two ago.) Please change your settings accordingly and please do let us know of any problems or questions. As usual, you can find our query form at:

Greetings,

Barring circumstances arising to the contrary, the mail server (outgoing and incoming) will finally be moving to the CSX mail and web server system (webmail.cs.okstate.edu) on Thursday of this week, May 28. This will involve probably an hour or two of mail server downtime during the day while the final changes are made and inboxes moved to the new server. After this change, the following will be true:

• Squirrelmail (web mail) will continue to be available at http://cs.okstate.edu/webmail and will talk to the new server instead of CSA;
• POP3 and IMAP readers will need to use webmail.cs.okstate.edu instead of a.cs.okstate.edu for incoming and outgoing and will use the CSX logins and passwords (as will the aforementioned web mail);
• Pine and mutt on CSA will be changed to talk to the new server (they already do on CSX);
• Anyone using other solutions can talk to me and we'll work out the details;
• .forward have already been copied to CSX accounts, but .procmailrc files will NOT be automatically copied due to possibility of causing bounces; users using procmail should proceed with caution and talk with me about special needs;
• All mailing lists and mail aliases should continue to work as previously. (Mailing list file ownership will be sorted out case by case.)

Please let me know after Thursday of anything that doesn't seem to be working as expected. The reason we do things like this in the summer is the awareness that there are always minor losses of functionality; that's how change goes. Doing this now gives us plenty of time to restore those functionalities before fall, so please do communicate with us so that we can do that.

Looking forward to finally getting the transition made, :)

Russ

Addendum 1:

Dr. Mayfield asked a question so good I realized I needed to answer it where the most people can see:

Will email to addresses such as "xyz@cs.okstate.edu" still work as before, or will they need to be changed as well?

Email addresses such as "xyz@cs.okstate.edu" will most assuredly still work. In fact, email addresses such as "xyz@a.cs.okstate.edu" will even still work, although of course we recommend not using those (actually, we've recommended not using those for years for exactly this reason.) We recommend the use of your_login_name@cs.okstate.edu when at all possible.

Addendum 2:

What about spam filtering?

spamprobe and spamassassin are both installed on the mail server; spamprobe is also installed on the CSX nodes to facilitate "manual" use. In theory, using these out of your .procmailrc should work fine, but please, in all things, proceed with caution when it comes to filtering. Again, this is why we are not automatically copying your .procmailrc file to CSX for you.

spamprobe users may also wish to try copying your .spamprobe directories to CSX so you can keep your accumulated filtering data. As of this writing, this behavior has not been tested, so again, proceed carefully.

The new pathnames, by the way, are /usr/bin/spamprobe and /usr/bin/spamassassin as well as /usr/bin/formail for those who were using that for one reason or another.