iMail, a new student email and information system for Los Rios students, was launched as a Sneak Preview on July 1st. This letter provides useful information about the system for faculty and staff as we begin the new academic year.
Over the last 18 months, a small group of faculty and technical staff has worked to develop a comprehensive student email solution (iMail) that reflects the best of our internal system and, at the same time, coordinates with students' outside addresses in a reasonable, educationally sound manner.
iMail was developed in-house as a replacement for both ZipMail and GoMail. As soon as they enroll, students get a limited, default iMail account of the form w+student_ID_number@imail.losrios.edu. For example, suppose Mark Garcia has student ID number 2330987 and has just enrolled. Faculty and staff can begin sending messages to Mark right away by sending email to the address: w2330987@imail.losrios.edu.
In order to read his messages, Mark must activate a full iMail account by visiting the web page https://imail.losrios.edu/newstudent. The site will verify that he is a student at a Los Rios college and ask him to agree to the Los Rios computer use policy. The iMail software will then give him a "human-friendly" address based upon his name, something like garciam@imail.losrios.edu. When Mark logs on, he will be able to send and receive email messages, including the early ones that were sent to him before he activated his account. At this point, faculty and staff may contact Mark by emailing at either the human-friendly garciam@imail.losrios.edu address or the student ID address w2330987@imail.losrios.edu. (Please note that, in order to prevent automated spam, faculty and staff must use computers within the Los Rios network to send messages to the student ID iMail address. Messages to the human-friendly iMail address may be sent from any Internet-connected computer.)
Is it possible to contact students who have not yet activated their iMail accounts? In some cases, the answer is yes. When students enroll, iMail associates each student ID number with the external address (Yahoo, Gmail, etc.) they provided on their application to college. For example, suppose Mark has not yet activated his iMail account; however, he entered his Gmail address mark_garcia@gmail.com when he completed his college application. Until he activates his iMail account, iMail will do an automatic "courtesy forward" from his student ID address w2330987@imail.losrios.edu to the external vendor address he supplied on his application mark_garcia@gmail.com. Courtesy forwarding, however, can never guarantee message delivery due to a variety of issues such as students entering a non-valid address on their application, or outside vendors closing accounts. The only safe way to send email to student is to ensure that they have activated their full iMail account first.
As you can see from the above, iMail is intended to be a comprehensive email solution for students and attempts to do some things that were not possible under the previous student email systems. For this reason, iMail will remain in Sneak Preview mode until a district-wide iMail Advisory Group with members from all constituency groups is formed to guide the development and evolution of iMail. Please send bug reports and comments to the Help Desk (helpdesk@losrios.edu).
iMail is a project sponsored by the office of the Vice Chancellor of Education and Technology and District Office Information Technology. Team members include Randy Jones, Mike Muzinich, Don Reid, Ken Sorensen, and Phil Smith.
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