Information Technology News Archive

1996 - 2017

You are here: Home / Archives for Email

Email

Campus E4E Faculty/Staff E-mail Service Upgraded

by

In early May, the campus E4E server was upgraded from a Sun SPARCserver 5 to a Sun Microsystems Ultra Enterprise 2 dual processor system. The new system has approximately 5 times the processing power of the old system. In addition, NACS made several other system software and configuration changes designed to improve efficiency.

Users who had been experiencing delays in mail delivery times and in accessing their mail noticed a big improvement from the upgrade. System statistics show that whereas the old CPU had troubles keeping up with the constant user load, the new one is virtually always caught up. NACS will monitor the status of the system and strive to keep processing power at the appropriate level as user demands increase.

Student E-mail Frequency of Use

by

For those who use it, e-mail is such a regular and essential part of everyday communications that one wonders how one ever did without it and just how many others are using it regularly. The principal channel for undergraduate e-mail activities at UCI is NACS’ EA (Educational Access) system.

During the last week of Winter Quarter 1998, just over 13,000 different students used the EA system. Broken down on by academic unit (and excluding those units with only graduate programs) usage ranged between 82% (in the School of the Arts) and 92% (in Social Sciences) of total student enrollment. Across all academic units with undergraduate programs, the number of students accessing the EA system in the tenth week of Winter quarter represented 85% of total student enrollment.

Sending and Receiving E-Mail Attachments

by

E-mail is a convenient tool for transmitting short, simple messages. Although some mail programs offer limited text formatting, the majority cannot send or receive messages that include italics, bold type, or underlining.

In order to address this limitation, most mail software, including Pine and Eudora (the two packages supported by NACS), allow users to send “attachments” with their e-mail messages. An attachment is any small file that accompanies an e-mail message. You might imagine an attachment as a document or picture which is enclosed in an envelope along with a cover letter. Upon receipt, the file is detached from the e-mail message, after which it can be opened by an appropriate software application, such as Microsoft Word, Excel, or WordPerfect.

Unfortunately, mail attachments do not always work seamlessly, especially when files are transferred from one platform to another or between different versions of software. To help you use this technology to its best advantage, we have assembled the following guidelines:

  1. Use MIME to encode messages, not Binhex or UUencoding;
  2. Do not send more attachments greater than 70,000 total characters in size;
  3. Use 8 letter file names with a 3 letter extension to make your attachments legible by users of older DOS/Windows machines. Example: PAPER.DOC;
  4. Include separate attachments in multiple file formats (Word, WordPerfect, RTF) if you do not know what software your correspondent has available.

To read the reasoning behind these guidelines, and find out more about attachments, please see the following Web document:http://eee.uci.edu/doc/attachments

Update on NACS Activities Supporting UCI’s Electronic Educational Environment

by

NACS-NEWS 96.6
October 25, 1996

  • Update on NACS Activities Supporting UCI’s Electronic Educational Environment

University of California, Irvine
Network & Academic Computing Services
NACS@UCI.EDU
http://www.nacs.uci.edu

 

The Electronic Educational Environment (EEE) is a cooperative campus-wide venture to make computer-mediated communications and electronic information resources an integral part of UCI’s educational environment. It combines the efforts of a number of organizations including the UCI Libraries, the Office of the Registrar, NACS, Division of Undergraduate Education, and academic departments.

The EEE web page at http://eee.uci.edu/ provides a general entry point to campus EEE activities. The program for the EEE Exhibit for Faculty (http://eee.uci.edu/doc/exhibit96.html), provides a good overview of the range of EEE activities being undertaken across campus.

NACS’ role in EEE includes providing campus-wide services and coordination and communications with faculty and other participants. This issue of NACS-News describes some of the services which NACS offers as part of the campus EEE.

 

UCInetIDs and Electronic Mail for All Students.

Beginning this academic year, all UCI students have a personal UCInetID pre-assigned to them. As with faculty and staff, all students have e-mail addresses of the form “ucinetid@uci.edu” For students, the default is to have e-mail delivered to an account on NACS’ EA (Educational Access) computer systems, but, like faculty and staff, students, can use the web to control where mail sent to their “ucinetid@uci.edu” addresses is delivered.

Each student activates his/her UCInetID by selecting a personal password to be used in conjunction with the UCInetID when accessing services which require authenticated personal identification. As part of the activation process, each student is advised of and accepts the campus Computer-Use Policy which is available, among other places, in the UCI General Catalog (page 401).

By the end of the second week of the quarter over 90% of the freshmen had activated their UCInetID. This is well ahead of last year’s pace, in which 95% of freshmen activated their UCInetIDs by the end of the academic year.

 

Educational Access (EA) Accounts

As a component of EEE, NACS provides electronic access services to all UCI students; these services include electronic mail, Internet access, computing resources and access to class information resources. These services are provided via the EA systems (ea.uci.edu), a cluster of UNIX-based Sun SPARCservers.

On a typical class day, over 6,000 different students use the EA systems. On weekends, over 3,000 different students use these systems each day. Each week, almost 11,000 different students access the EA systems. This figure indicates that more than 70% of UCI undergraduates access their e-mail each week. As a practical matter, it means that an e-mail announcement sent to all students enrolled in a class will reach as many of those students in a week as an announcement made during a class meeting.

 

 

EEE Web Site – http://eee.uci.edu/

NACS manages the campus EEE web site, which provides a campus repository of course materials and services as well as a set of tools and facilities to facilitate the creation of course web pages and web-accessible resources.

The EEE Web site functions as a central reference point for course-related web materials at UCI. The EEE web site organizes instructional resources into a consistent and easily navigable structure and incorporates links to information provided by the UCI Registrar and other campus units. From a single page, students and instructors can learn about class enrollment statistics, the availability of course books, room assignments and seating arrangements, credit options, prerequisites, and so on. Instructors for over 60 courses, with a total enrollment of over 6,200 students have course web areas on the http://eee.uci.edu/ web site. Another 1,800 students are enrolled in other courses which have web areas on other computer systems. The EEE Web site lists course web areas on systems supported by NACS and by other campus units.

The EEE Web site hosts Web accessible, searchable archives of e-mail messages which serve two critical functions. First, they include archives of e-mail messages sent out via the course mailing list system described below. Second, individual faculty members can request personal e-mail archives with the same functionality (i.e., web-accessibility and full search capabilities) to facilitate interaction with their colleagues. See http://eee.uci.edu/w3m3/ for examples of such archives.

 

EEE Web Tools

The EEE Web site also features a suite of tools designed to help instructors move new and existing course materials onto the web. Documents written with most word processors can be converted into web publishable format, and the syntax of hypertext documents can be checked against current publishing standards for validity. Using these tools, individuals with no prior knowledge of Web publishing conventions can convert the personalized bookmark files generated by their Web browsers into publishable documents that can be made available to students and colleagues.

Instructors who want to give students access to grades for individual quizzes, tests or for an entire course can request an EEE Gradebook for their Class Web accounts. Gradebooks provide a simple, yet secure mechanism for distributing grades to individual students, and, at the instructor’s option, can incorporate a graphic representation of the grade distribution for the entire class.

Additional tools serve more specialized needs. For example, the FLIQ package allows instructors to use the Web to interactively create multimedia, interactive practice quizzes. These exercises emphasize discrete skill acquisition, but can be adapted for use in a variety of educational settings.

 

EEE Course Mailing Lists

NACS and the Registrar offer a service that allows faculty to use their usual e-mail software to send electronic mail directly to all students enrolled in classes they are teaching. Searchable archives of all such mailings to a given class are automatically maintained by the e-mail archive facilities described above. This system facilitates the electronic distribution and accessibility of assignments, reference information, and a variety of other materials in a timely, low-cost, low-effort fashion. See http://eee.uci.edu/doc/maillists for complete information on using course mailing lists.

As of the start of the fourth week of the quarter, 204 classes with a combined enrollment of almost 11,000 students have sent over 1,800 postings to these mailing lists resulting in over 110,000 e-mail messages delivered.