Service Type:
Electronic Mail Services (Email)
Service Name:
ITD Email Services
Brief description of service:
ITD provides SMTP (Simple Mail Transport Protocol), and IMAP (Internet Message
Access Protocol) email services to the NC State community.
ITD makes every effort to ensure quick, reliable email transport and delivery,
but sometimes delays can and must occur, and any given email message may
take several hours or more to reach its destination. This document explains
how email is delivered and describes the quality of email service the campus
community can reasonably expect.
Email works on what is referred
to as a "store and forward" system. For example, apiece of email starts
out on your machine, then travels from one server to another until it finally
arrives at the server holding the recipient's mailbox. Each intermediate
server stores the message locally until it is forwarded to the next server
in line; the email resides on only one server at a time.
As often happens in any collection
of networked systems, interruptions can occur. The network could be down
in one place, or a server could be broken or overloaded to a point where
it can't handle any more mail. Knowing that these things can and do happen,
email delivery has a built-in method of compensating: Email that fails to
get forwarded stays on the sending server and delivery gets retried every
30 minutes for three days.
Designed into the
email delivery process is a mechanism whereby the receiving
server can tell the sending server "I'm not taking mail right
now, try back later." Many popular email servers (including
Hotmail, AOL, Yahoo, and us) do this all the time when large
batches of email come in, so they don't get overloaded trying to
handle too much email at one time.
It is impossible to
guarantee immediate email delivery. It's explicitly built into
the system and considered perfectly acceptable for the email to
be delayed for some period of time. Only if the mail cannot be
delivered after three days is it considered an error.
This point is important enough
to repeat: It is impossible to guarantee immediate mail delivery. If email
can't be delivered for some period of time, the protocol accounts for those
delays and will attempt retries at periodic intervals.
Clients eligible for service:
All NC
State students, faculty and staff
Type of use:
University business or personal use
Cost:
There is no additional charge for using
the campus SMTP email relays or IMAP servers.
To obtain service:
ITD automatically generates Unity computing accounts and email
services for all NC State students, faculty and staff. To use the NCSU Webmail
client, log in to https://webmail.ncsu.edu/.
For further information visit the Computing Essentials website (http://www.ncsu.edu/it/essentials/)
or contact the NC State Help Desk at http://help.ncsu.edu
or help@ncsu.edu
Rules of use:
All NC State computer and network resources are governed
by
Administrative Regulations - Computer Use
Submitted by: tkl
Last modified: December
14 , 2005,jd