Starting in June and continuing into the fall, McGill IT Services will be making the following changes to optimize our email processes and gain the full benefits of moving to Email on Office 365:
1) New management of redirects
Starting mid-June, all users will have a new way to self-manage redirects from their @mail.mcgill.ca and @mcgill.ca email addresses to other email services (e.g., Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, or McGill departmental servers).
Instead of using McGill’s Reggie site to specify a redirect, all students, alumni, faculty and staff members will have a McGill mailbox on Office 365 that they can manage themselves, via one of three options:
- Option 1: Add the McGill email account to your computer/device (in addition to your alternative email accounts)
- Option 2: Go to the web interface of your preferred/alternative email provider and “Add” your McGill email account (i.e., sync your McGill email to the other service)
- Option 3: Forward mail from your McGill email to another email address
Note that restrictions on use of cloud services for instructors and staff may prevent some people from using options 2 and 3. Find details and instructions in the IT Knowledge Base article Options for dealing with multiple email services.
Those who currently have redirects in place will receive a notification shortly, with instructions on how to proceed.
2) Decommissioning of legacy email addresses: @staff.mcgill.ca and @elf.mcgill.ca
Old email addresses ending in @staff.mcgill.ca and @elf.mcgill.ca will be decommissioned in September. These addresses were phased out and replaced by @mcgill.ca and @mail.mcgill.ca in 2004.Most people who had the old addresses stopped using them long ago; however the old addresses still exist and currently redirect incoming mail to active accounts. After the decommissioning, any mail sent to the old addresses will simply not be delivered. Faculty, staff and alumni affected by this change have already been notified; those who entered McGill after 2004 are not affected.
3) Anti-spam and antivirus services provided through Office 365
Currently, email for most of McGill still flows through servers managed by central IT. In addition to basic routing, these servers also provide antivirus and antispam services. In the fall, IT Services will replace these services with Microsoft Office 365 functions. Further details will be announced in the fall.