The Ohio State University Home

 

OSU E-Mail and The Student

Updated: 2/23/2005

 

The university now provides students with two options for reading their e-mail. The first option is through the use of a Post Office Protocol (POP3) client.  The second is OSU Webmail.  The Ohio State University now offers webmail services for users of the OSU central e-mail system.  This service is available at https://webmail.osu.edu   If a user needs assistance in using this service, he/she should reference the Office of Information Technology knowledge base article:  http://8help.ohio-state.edu/1455.html .

Webmail may only be used for reading e-mail on the OSU central e-mail system.  Anyone able to authenticate to the site can send e-mail using the service.  In other words, if a user is forwarding his/her e-mail to another ISP, he/she won't be able to read their e-mail on OSU's webmail site, but will be able to login and send e-mail from it; return address will be lastname.#@osu.edu.

For more more information  regarding the  OSU central e-mail system , please check out these web pages:

The OSU e-mail server uses Post Office Protocol (POP3).  This means that the e-mail for the users comes into a central server, and the users use e-mail client software to move the mail to their personal computer.  As a result, retrieved messages are located on the personal computer, rather than on the OIT server.  In the OIT Student Computer Centers, the e-mail is downloaded to a diskette or zip disk.  To access that message later a student needs to use that same disk.  Instructions for setting up a home computer to read e-mail either on the hard drive or on a disk used in a Student Computer Center are available at http://8help.ohio-state.edu. The user should do a keyword search on "e-mail disk" to access these instructions.  Students who do not know how to access this zip disk or diskette from their home machine may believe they have lost their e-mail, but this is not the case.

If mail is mistakenly downloaded to the wrong drive using Eudora:  Create a new mailbox called, for example, “oops.”  Transfer the messages from the "in" mailbox to the “oops” mailbox.  Copy the oops.mbx file to a floppy or zip disk.  Finally, copy the oops.mbx file to the location of your other mailbox files.  The messages can now be read.

Should a student wish to have their e-mail forwarded to a different Internet Service Provider so that they may read it there, it is forwarded directly from their osu.edu address to that provider and is not available to the student on the OSU e-mail server at any time. Likewise, the Office of Information Technology is not affiliated with any of the Internet Services Providers or providers of web mail readers other than https://webmail.osu.edu.   If the user chooses to use these services, they are utilizing the services of a company rather than a service provided by OSU and are subject to the rules and procedures established by those companies, in addition to policies established for e-mail use by OSU, (and some of the ISPs may delete user mail after a very short retention time, resulting in "lost" e-mail).

When using a company rather than a service provided by OSU, it is important to know how the company will manage your forwarded e-mail.

For example, some ISPs have options to filter bulk mail.  If the University Registrar sends email to a name.n@osu.edu address, and that e-mail is forwarded to a specific ISP’s account, the message is probably getting filtered into a folder called the Bulk Mail Folder.  The reason is that the ISP’s software looks at e-mail that isn't addressed directly to it and assumes the e-mail is a result of a harvesting operation.

For future reference: there are also options with many ISPs to block e-mail from certain addresses, and with one ISP there is a setting that makes it so the user will accept e-mail ONLY from addresses specified (and many people don't understand the ramifications of this when they set it up -- or don't even realize they did set it up).

If students have technical questions regarding OIT's recommended e-mail configuration settings and e-mail management, they should be encouraged to contact the OSU Office of Information Technology help desk by e-mail at 8help@osu.edu or by phone at 688-HELP (688-4357).  The hours for this service are 7 AM-10 PM M-F and 4PM-10PM on Sunday.  Users are also encouraged to visit the help desk web site: http://8help.ohio-state.edu/.  This site provides forms to request common services as well as a keyword search facility.  A keyword search of "e-mail instructions" at that site results in locating a link to the correct e-mail configuration instructions for the e-mail clients supported by OIT.

Activate Your OSU E-Mail Account NOW!

NOTE 1:  If a student wishes to have his/her e-mail forwarded they may request e-mail forwarding here: http://8help.ohio-state.edu/mail_forwarding.html.

NOTE 2:  For Eudora e-mail instructions, click here: http://8help.ohio-state.edu/34529.html.  

Recommended strategy for managing your e-mail -- Use popmail on your personal machine and OSU webmail when using a machine in one of the OSU Student Computing Centers.