Starting Aug. 13, all university-related e-mails will be sent to students’ Unity e-mail addresses, whether or not it is currently their preferred address on PackTracks.A campus-wide e-mail was sent to students on July 24, announcing the switch.”E-mail regarding your classes, student information, eBILLs and correspondence from faculty will be sent to your Unity address,” it said.The e-mail announced that every student’s preferred e-mail address will be changed on PackTracks to his or her Unity address. Susan Klein, director of the Information Technology Division on campus, said this switch is a result of an increased reliance on e-mail as the primary communication between the university and students. She said that this change will instill confidence that students are receiving e-mails that contain important information for school. The current e-mailing system, which allows students to change their preferred e-mail address to a non-university given address, has caused a number of problems, according to Klein. “First, we didn’t know for sure if the e-mail address the student provided was actually the email address for the student,” she said. “It could have been someone else — a parent’s address for instance, or an old, obsolete address.” Klein also said the university ran into problems when sending out bulk e-mails to a large number of students. “Some e-mail providers would think that we were spam and put us on their block list,” she said. “Some students didn’t get university-sent e-mails, and they didn’t even realize it.”Dr. Alex Graves, an assistant professor in Soil Science, said she has not had any significant problems contacting students who use an alternative e-mail address. But, she said she agrees with Klein that this is a positive change for the university. “I can understand why they would want to make the switch to a more unified system,” Graves said. “Especially with what happened at Virginia Tech, I can definitely understand why they would want to make sure that the university can contact students in a timely and uniformed manner.” Though the university needed this switch to have more confidence in communication, Klein said officials also wanted to allow students flexibility with their e-mail options.According to the announcement, students will be given the option to have their mail forwarded to a preferred e-mail address. Klein said she hopes this flexibility will keep everyone happy.”We wanted to provide students with the forwarding service so that they can decide for themselves how they want to receive their mail — with still giving us the confidence that our emails are being received,” she said. Students can activate their e-mail forwarding service on-line at https://sysnews.ncsu.edu/tools-bin/usmdb-forwards. This service will forward all mail sent to a student’s Unity account to another preferred e-mail address. Klein said students must renew their forwarding service yearly — a step to ensure that all forwarding addresses stay current. Many students are discontent with their Webmail accounts due to a large amount of spam, Klein said. Graves agreed, saying that she has only had problems contacting students through e-mail when they are using their Unity accounts — the amount of spam makes it difficult to find important e-mails. This problem is also something the ITD is hoping to improve. According to Klein, the university began using a new spam filter, called “Pure Message,” in May 2006. She said any Unity accounts set up after May 6, 2006, were automatically configured with the new spam filter. Any students with older Unity accounts have to set up the default spam filter themselves. “Many students are not using the spam filter, but it’s very easy to set up,” Klein said. “All students have to do is go to the website for it and click one button — and the default settings will begin to work.”The website for the spam filter setup is: https://sysnews.ncsu.edu/tools-php/spam-filter-setup.php. Dennis Porch, a lecturer in Communication who earned his Master’s degree in Communication in May, said he uses his Webmail account to communicate with students, and checks his mail several times a day. He said that since he set up the new spam filter, he’s been satisfied with Webmail. “With the spam filter, I don’t really get any spam, except sometimes I worry that I’m deleting non-spam when I purge the spam folder,” Porch said. “It fills up so fast I never even look to see what’s going in there.” Klein said that the default setting takes any e-mails it thinks are spam and moves them into another folder. It doesn’t automatically delete them but the student is able to alter that setting, she said.

For more information on the e-mail switch, visit http://www.ncsu.edu/it/essentials/email_messaging/address-changes-2007.html .