Borg/Squirrelmail Upgrade FAQ

What are you doing?
Upgrading the hardware, mail server software and webmail software on borg.oakton.edu, the employee e-mail server.   The most obvious change to employees will be the new Webmail client Squirrelmail which will replace the existing IMP webmail client.    For off campus users, webmail will also now require SSL security.

When will this happen?
Saturday, December 4, 2004 at 5:30 PM.   At this time employee e-mail services on the old borg server will be shutdown, and we will begin migrating the existing email and configuration settings from the old server to the new server.    The new server should be online and fully operational by 8:00 AM, Sunday December 5, 2004.

How can I report a problem?
If you experience a problem with your e-mail after the conversion, please contact the Information Technology Help Desk:  helpdesk@oakton.edu or via telephone at 847-635-1965 or drop by the help desk in room 1710.   Since the help desk is only open Monday - Friday, if you experience any problems on the Sunday morning after the conversion, please contact the Data Center at 847-635-1773.

Why are you doing this anyway?
Our current Employee mail server is running on 6 year old server hardware with limited processing power and storage.   Support and upgrades are no longer available for both the operating system and hardware.   A newer operating system and software should offer better security, reliability, features and performance.  The new hardware should offer substantially better performance, storage capacity and continued reliability.  The student mail server was upgraded in September.

What are the main benefits?

• The squirrelmail webmail client is significantly more full featured than IMP  See the notes below.
• Your email quota will increase from 60 MB to 150 MB
• Off campus users will now use secure (SSL) connections to the webmail server to better protect privacy.
• The new server should be faster and allow us to continue to offer reliable services.

What gets converted?
All existing saved email messages and mailboxes will be brought over.   The conversion should preserve seen state, answered status, priority and other flags for all existing messages.  Any messages received during the conversion will be queued and delivered after the new server is up and running. All entries in the current IMP (Webmail) addressbook will be converted into Squirrelmail's format.   Note that due to the differences in format some of your personal address book, some entries may need to be reformatted manually.   Any existing sieve email filters or email forwarding status will be preserved.   Your password also will not change.

What gets lost?
Due to the difference in format, any existing webmail preferences will be lost.  (Most of the settings are irrelevant in Squirrelmail except for the email signature.)

What has Changed in Webmail?
The new Squirrelmail client offers many new features unavailable in IMP.  Some of these include:

• Message Search feature:  Allows you to search for messages by header fields or even key words in the body of the message either in a particular folder or across all folders.
• Enhanced Spell Checker:   Offers suggestions for misspelled words and allows you to correct the message in the composition window.
• HTML composer:  Create HTML formatted messages in webmail including different fonts, colors and sizes of text, images, tables etc.  (This feature requires Internet Explorer 6)
• Better Reply to HTML messages:  No more funny HTML codes when you reply to HTML formatted messages
• Easy Server side Filters - including a SPAM filter:  Create flexible server side filters to properly route, reject or delete messages.  Take advantage of Oakton's SPAM tagging service to get  rid of some unwanted messages.
• Secure Off Campus Access:    Access to webmail from off campus now requires SSL  (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption to protect privacy and passwords.   See http://www.oakton.edu/resource/it/sslinfo.html for more details about SSL at Oakton
• Visible Quota Status:  Squirrelmail show a colored email quota usage graph on the main window (Don't let it get to RED!)
• Manage/Delete Large numbers of messages (Toggle All):     Come back from vacation and find you have 2000 messages in you Inbox, you can now delete them all in one step!
• Permanently delete individual messages from Trash:   No need to empty the Trash completely unless you want to,
• LDIF Import:  Allows you to bring in a personal address book from any email client that supports the LDIF standard.   Squirrelmail continues to use Oakton's LDAP directory to allow you to look up fellow Oakton employees or students
• Printer Friendly option:   Makes it easier to kill trees and get paper copies.

What hardware/software will you be using?
The new server is a 2.8 Ghz P4 Xeon dual processor HP Proliant DL380G3 with 2 GB of memory.   Network connectivity is via gigabit ethernet.  Disk storage is two mirrored (RAID 1) 36 GB, 15,000 RPM disks for the operating system.  E-mail data is stored on our 6 TB, 2 GB/s Fibre Channel, Storage Area Network (SAN).    The operating system is Red Hat Enterprise Linux.  Mail Server software is the Cyrus IMAP mail server from Carnegie Melon University.  The Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) is qmail.    The web mail client is squirrelmail, a php application running on the Apache web server.    This is pretty much an update to our existing email environment.

Where can I find out more information about my account or employee access to technology at Oakton?
Visit the "IT Home Page" web page at http://www.oakton.edu/resource/it/

Why doesn't Oakton's email system do <insert feature here> ?
Probably because we didn't think of it, or maybe because it is not possible.   Suggestions are always appreciated.  Send your requests for feature enhancements, improved default preferences, etc. to the Information Technology Help Desk helpdesk@oakton.edu

Who did all the work?
Most of the configuration work was done by John Widera  (John is going to be very happy when this project is over.) with assistance from Jim Hickey and Francisco Sosa.      Julia Gray did the "Oakton Theme" and Dann Foster, Sue Roberts and Nadine Poyser assisted with testing, feature and configuration suggestions and documentation.   Administrative and technical direction provided by John Wade