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IRMACS EMail Migration

Historically, IRMACS has included an EMail service for the IRMACS research community. Over the next two months (April/May) we will be migrating all IRMACS EMail users to using SFU Connect. We have several goals with this migration:

  • To take advantage of the infrastructure and expertise that SFU has devoted to supporting the state of the art Zimbra collaboration suite (SFU Connect).
  • To free up IRMACS technical infrastructure and staff from running commodity services like EMail and focus on the support of IRMACS researchers and their projects.

The IRMACS EMail service will be ending on June 1st 2011. The migration to SFU Connect will be taking place April through May, with a cutoff of the old mail service at the beginning of June.

Please read through the documentation on this site as it should answer most of your questions!

Support and Documentation

Moving to a new EMail system is a big change for many people. To help you through the transition, the IRMACS Technical Group, in collaboration with IT Services, will be providing documentation and support throughout the process. Please take a look through this website to find the answers to your questions. If you do not find a satisfactory answer, send us an EMail at help@irmacs.sfu.ca.

Almost all IRMACS EMail users will fall into one of two categories:

  • You use the IRMACS EMail server and need to migrate your EMail and your EMail account to SFU Connect. If this is you, you should follow the IRMACS-Connect EMail Migration Procedures.
  • You already forward your EMail to SFU Connect (or another university/EMail provider) and don't use and/or don't store any EMail on the IRMACS server. In this case, all you need to do is send an EMail to help@irmacs.sfu.ca (see here for details) letting us know this is the case. We will create a system level EMail alias for your account such that your @irmacs.sfu.ca will be permanently forwarded to your @sfu.ca EMail. If you are forwarding EMail to another university or EMail provider you will also need to log in to SFU Connect and forward your IRMACS EMail to your external EMail provider. If you don't have an SFU Connect EMail account, don't worry! All IRMACS users will be provided with SFU Connect accounts. You will be contacted about the creation of your SFU Connect account, after which you should follow the above procedures. See the frequently asked questions section for a more detailed description of the tasks you will need to carry out.

For more inforamtion, see:

A Quick Summary of the Migration

If you don't have time to read through the documentation right now, these are the most important facts about the migration:

  • You're not going to lose your old @irmacs.sfu.ca EMail addresses. Mail to those addresses will be forwarded to your @sfu.ca account.
  • We have automated migration methods to bring your IRMACS EMail over to SFU Connect wholesale. If you want to do this, you'll need to sign up. See the Automated Migration page for more information.
  • We have documentation on manual migration methods that you can use to manually move your EMail from IRMACS over to SFU Connect using your current local mail client. See the Migration Procedures page for information specific to your mail client.
  • If you migrate your EMail yourself, make sure you send an EMail to help@irmacs.sfu.ca indicating that you have moved your EMail yourself and do not need us to perform the migration for you. This will help us keep track of who needs to be migrated and who does not. Please include your IRMACS and SFU Computing IDs in this EMail.
  • If you don't sign up for automated migration, and you don't do a manual migration yourself, you won't lose your EMail. Your EMail will be placed into your IRMACS home directory if you need to retreive it later.
  • SFU Connect quotas are 5GB for most users. If you're an EMail packrat, please try to clean up your mail before moving it. Larger quotas will be made available if necessary, but we would appreciate efforts to keep this to a minimum.

If you want to know more, please read the FAQ page.